


Syllables of Debris

by Onmyliteraturebullshitagain



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Aged-Up Character(s), Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst with a Happy Ending, Changing POV, Characters are 21 and 22, Developing Relationship, Dramatics, Eventual Happy Ending, Experimental Style, Friends With Benefits, Friends to Lovers, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Language, Literary References & Allusions, Love Confessions, M/M, Mutual Pining, Non-Explicit Sex, Non-Graphic Smut, Overly Poetic Language Throughout, Poetry, Secret Identity, Showing Love with Poetry, Smoking, Sokka and Zuko are both literary nerds, Title is from a poem by Terrance Hayes, Ultimately so much love and support and care because that's me as an author, poet Zuko, zukka - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-29
Updated: 2021-01-30
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:48:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 51,538
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28411161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Onmyliteraturebullshitagain/pseuds/Onmyliteraturebullshitagain
Summary: Zuko is a marginally famous poet who writes under the pseudonym the Blue Spirit. Facing the lingering fears of a family he escaped from, a failed past relationship, and a lack of direction in his life, he's not sure what to expect when a beautiful boy in his college poetry class catches his eye.Sokka is an engineering student pulled back by his love of the humanities who falls for the brooding guy in the corner, completely unaware that this guy is actually his favorite poet, the Blue Spirit. All he knows is that he's fascinated and he's determined to know more.But when feelings end up a bit deeper than either bargained for and secrets come to the surface, will love and poetry be enough to bring them back together?
Relationships: Past Jet/Zuko - Relationship, Sokka/Zuko (Avatar)
Comments: 631
Kudos: 570





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This story was inspired by a post on tumblr by chief-yue: [Post](https://chief-yue.tumblr.com/post/636901485930741760/whats-our-opinion-on-an-au-where-zuko-is-a-fairly)
> 
> This definitely began as a more lighthearted take on the prompt but turned instead into a deep dive into literature, poetry analysis, and dramatically emotive writing. If you've read my Midwest Bi Disaster Zukka series, this is also a modern AU but with a very different take on the characters. It does still ultimately comes back to my true love in writing relationships: emotional support, communication, and being good to each other. There're just some serious issues with trust, intimacy, and sense of self, as well as one very intense on-stage love declaration before our boys can get there.
> 
> I hope you enjoy, and always feel free to kudos, comment, or hop over to onmyliteraturebullshitagain on tumblr if you'd like to chat more!

_Tell me about this body._

_Brindle-hearted and prone to wandering. I would go if my soul was not a split open pear._

_I want to be purged but there's too much, my skull breaking with the strain of holding all of me within, all of this matted and ill mannered self._ _Wine left in the sun. The yellowing bruise still lingering. Blood between the teeth. Heavy with too much tarnish._

_I'm a house after a fire, brittle with ash, dirtying to the touch._

\-- the Blue Spirit

He couldn't ever find the words anymore. He wrote still, just like he used to, in notebooks and on his phone and his laptop and occasionally on scraps of paper when there wasn't anything else on hand. He scribbled down lines and lists of words and bits of description and things that tamed a bit of the animal roar of his damn brain. Still, none of it was quite right, and he wanted to poke at every scrap of a poem, make them unlock their secrets, become _good_. Nothing had been good recently, not really, not since the first book, not since his boyfriend had left, not since life changed again. Not like before. It was all missing something, some stupid undescrible quality that probably had a word in French or German or something but not here, not for him.

Maybe he couldn't expect inspiration to come for him twice. Maybe the poetry gods had deserted him. 

Maybe he was just waiting for the right lightning strike.

***

_She's all states, and all princes I;_

_Nothing else is;_

_Princes do but play us; compared to this,_

_All honour's mimic, all wealth alchemy._

_Thou, Sun, art half as happy as we,_

_In that the world's contracted thus;_

_Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be_

_To warm the world, that's done in warming us_.

_Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;_

_This bed thy center is, these walls thy sphere_.

\-- John Donne

"I don't get it," a blonde haired guy (who Sokka was already starting to hate) said in his nasally voice. "It's a guy talking to the sun about people waking up and using 'thou' a lot. What's the big deal?"

Sokka was about to chime in, hoping to somehow give his own analysis of Donne's poem without also giving in to the impulse to call his peer a giant fucking idiot, but he didn't have to.

"Have you seriously never heard of a metaphor?" said the quieter guy in the back of the classroom. "Did you also think hope was _literally_ 'the thing with feathers' when we were reading Emily Dickinson?"

His expression was funny, sort of half annoyed, half sardonic, and something about him stood out in the old classroom space--the beige stone, the metal-rimmed windows, the mismatched desks, the mismatched students. Sokka couldn't have said why entirely. Maybe the black clothes, maybe the angles of his body crammed into the desk, maybe something else completely. But he was _different_ , every time he talked in class was different, and Sokka knew it.

The blonde turned a bit red at the guy's retort and stammered something about 'knowing what metaphors were--he was just _saying_ ' but Sokka mostly ignored him in favor of shooting a smile at the guy in the back.

Said guy seemed surprised at his look, at meeting his eyes. But after a moment of hesitation, he returned it, and even a crooked bit of smile did something impressive to his face under the dark hair and the reddish scar around his left eye. Something that softened the lines, unlocked something underneath. Sokka felt that returned smile like a lurch in his gut.

Something was on the horizon. He could feel like it the prickle of coming snow in the winter, like sunrise there at the edge of his eyeline.

***

_Tell me about monsters._

_Punch-drunk encyclopedias as old as humanity, hand-sketched catalogue of all the things we fear. We tie our hands together and count shadows, count heartbeats, and leave bells on cords in case the dead still cry._

_How many of our monsters are human in the end? Why too often is it just my pain-painted face in the mirror?_

\-- The Blue Spirit

Being a published poet at twenty-two should have conferred some sort of accolade or at least funds enough for Zuko to afford something better than a cramped studio apartment. But that's what he got for using an alias and for not writing mass-market poetry like Rupi Kaur or Richard Siken. No shade to them, but Zuko knew he wasn't exactly writing the shit that would sell to everyone. He was too preoccupied with word choice and mechanics and allusions no one but him cared about to make it big as a poet. So he was still in college, still pursuing a degree, still working part time in a tea shop. Mostly, he was just hoping his uncle, who taught the introduction to poetry class he was taking as a required elective, wouldn't think it was funny to have the whole class read one of his poems.

Excuse me, read one of the "Blue Spirit's" poems. 

At least the studio apartment was _his_ , completely untouched by the outside world, by anyone who knew him. It was untouchable in its remoteness, in its shabby separation, and that was worth something. He dropped his messenger bag by the door and flipped on the light, listening as the aging radiator wheezed back to life once again to counteract the early September chill coming on outside. He needed to eat something. He needed to work on his paper for Advanced Composition. He needed to do a load of dishes.

Instead, he was still thinking about "The Sun Rising" by John Donne and the boy with the blue eyes. 

Impossibly blue, especially for the silky brown of his skin and the clever tilt of his eyebrows and the dark fade of his hair. Blue enough that Zuko could still picture them, cutting through the room, staring right through him. 

Zuko shook his head. What the hell was wrong with him?

Clearly something. He kicked the radiator as he passed to encourage it to pump at least a little heat into this tiny space, and then dug through his cabinets for something he could eat quickly, without having to think about it. 

Who was he, that guy? He looked about Zuko's age and he actually participated in class (thoughtfully too, unlike half those morons), and he'd smiled at Zuko when he'd been a bitch to another classmate. So that must mean… something. 

It was still the color blue that had him caught, the color of those eyes that was neither ocean nor sky, not quite fitting into any of the conventional similes. And maybe that was why Zuko kept thinking about him. He wasn't much for conventional similes, and so much of that guy begged for comparison and exploration. What did he draw when Zuko could tell he wasn't taking notes, and why wasn't he? Did he not notice when the smear of graphite got on the side of his hand, putting the creases and wrinkles into relief, or did he not care? When he narrowed his eyes as Iroh was talking, was he engaged or irritated, confused or conceptualizing? 

Most importantly, why the smile? Why notice Zuko at all? 

This was dangerous territory. It was one thing for him to be fascinated with those blue eyes and the man who owned them as some sort of poetic muse. It was another thing _entirely_ to be starting to think about him romantically. Which he clearly was, if the fixation on that smile and expression was any indication. Only Zuko didn't do "romantically." Not anymore. Not in a long time. Life had beaten the shit out of him enough without inviting more chances for that, inviting people into his life who could get to know him well enough to punch holes right through him when they left. 

That was another thing the studio had that going for it: no memories of that boy that had been and then disappeared. Of loving like Zuko could hold together the whole world with it only to find that still wasn't enough. The acrid, salt taste of vulnerability, of proving that he was too hard to love, and then a note and a key abandoned on a kitchen countertop. Part of him was still convinced that moment was when he'd lost his poetry, but in truth, it had probably happened long before that, the moment Zuko felt his lover pull back from him in the dark. 

He shook his head. It had been long enough now that he shouldn't still agonize over it. It hadn't done any good a day after and wouldn't do any good a year after. He was away from it now, away from the lost love that was Jet, away from his fucked up family still clawing at him, safe here in the life he'd carved out for himself and his pathetic little fire-licked heart.

Shit, he wanted a cigarette, which was the one stupid thing Jet had left him with. But he didn't smoke anymore, not unless it was truly an emergency.

And this boy with the blue eyes, that open smile? He was not an emergency.

So Zuko would just be careful, keep his distance, find another category to put this guy in before he stumbled too close to the edge and fell over again. He'd had his share of falling and was done with it, but that didn't change that the boy was still haunting him like words on the tip of his tongue. They were right there, the words, taunting him, beckoning and then fleeing again.

Ugh, but he kept chasing them anyway. 

He gave up on dinner, found his laptop, and flopped into his bed, back against the headboard. He pulled open a new document and stared at it, the glowing whiteness, and considered. He'd been playing with second person again recently, like his one published book of poems, where so much of it was structured around narrative distance, someone the "I" in the poem spoke to and questioned. Sometimes the audience, sometimes another inner self, sometimes an unseen character. Facets of Zuko's life, the people he wished could answer. It had started out of his own desire to process, to question and poke and claw at his own psyche to try to understand it. But now… now he wasn't sure why he was still drawn to it. 

Regardless, he typed out a tentative first line:

 _Tell me about the color blue_.

***

_I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,_

_some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent._

_I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster._

_—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture_

_I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident_

_the art of losing's not too hard to master_

_though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster._

\-- Elizabeth Bishop

"It's the idea that all loss--big, small, literal, figurative--it's all part of the experience of being human," Sokka said, tapping the end of his pencil against his notebook. "It shapes us whether we think it does or not."

Professor Iroh nodded and sat back again on his desk. "Very nice analysis, Mr. Amaruq. What do others think of this claim?"

The class was in one of the older buildings on campus, all brick and ancient fluorescents and cold windows, too-small creaky desks and squeaky linoleum floors and the scent of dust and books and passing time. It was, in many way, exactly what Sokka had imagined when he pictured taking a poetry class in college.

"What I think is interesting," said the dark haired guy in the back corner, the intriguing one Sokka kept sneaking glances at during class, "is that Bishop calls it an 'art,' like it's something we learn or practice."

"Maybe it's dealing with the loss that's an art we learn," Sokka offered directly to him, and the guy met his eyes. "Maybe that's why she builds from little things like keys all the way up to losing a person."

The guy's eyes were a strange, deep gold, shrouded and vivid at the same time, and they stayed locked on Sokka's face. 

"And the 'Write It' at the end is her art of processing loss?" he asked, sounding genuinely curious, and Sokka felt oddly pinned by the intensity in his gaze.

"Maybe it is," Sokka replied. "It seems like she's mastered all the other forms, accepted all those minor types of loss, but not what it feels like to lose the unnamed 'you.' Maybe that's the only kind of 'losing' she still has to write out and practice."

The guy was watching him still, like he was studying him, memorizing him. Analyzing him like another poem. It should have been disconcerting, but for some reason it wasn't. 

"It's the only one she says is a disaster also," the guy continued, eyes unwavering. "Not homes or continents or memories. Just that person."

Sokka couldn't look away: angular eyes, the one surrounded by the scar narrower and cut sharply like it was trapped in anger. The dark hair on his forehead and almost sweeping those eyes, the strong cut of cheekbones and jawline, and the curve of his lips in between. Strangely pretty lips for such a sharp face otherwise, bowed just a little and expressive. 

"Just the person," Sokka repeated, maybe a bit distantly, and then jerked his eyes away from a _literal stranger's_ mouth.

The guy's one eyebrow had risen just a little, but there, again, was just a fragile bit of a smile.

The room had also gone quiet and electric, but maybe it was only Sokka feeling that part. 

"Are we supposed to believe she literally owned realms?" the blonde suddenly chimed in, as helpful as always. "Like she was a queen or something?"

The spell was broken instantly, and Sokka jerked his eyes away and looked back at his notes instead. Scattered bullets and sentences and fragmented quotes, all interspersed with badly done doodles and sketches that got smeared on the paper when he moved his hands. Professor Iroh was talking again, responding to the other student's question and seeing how others interpreted that stanza as well. Sokka rubbed his pencil against the shaved side of his head and glanced at the guy again. 

He was writing something too, one foot pulled up against the weird little book rack under the desk, the other leg stretched out before him. Mostly, he was just hunched over his own notebook, and Sokka liked watching the quick, sharp way he wrote, like if he didn't do it quickly something would escape. 

Sokka tried to turn his attention back to the last few minutes of class but found he couldn't.

***

_Tell me all the burdens that you carry, the words I could lick into your open wounds to help them heal since I clearly cannot heal my own._

\-- The Blue Spirit

Zuko tossed his stuff into his messenger bag once Iroh dismissed them, but he was still thinking about the guy with the blue eyes and Zuko's absolute inability to capture him on paper. Maybe he really had lost it. Maybe his poetry was really gone. Just dumb luck that first time and then a slide into obscurity.

He was deep in thought enough as he headed out of the classroom and down the hallway that he didn't hear the slap of feet catching up to him until a body was directly beside him. 

"Hey there!" said the person who appeared, and Zuko found himself confronted by those blue eyes that were haunting him.

"Uh, hi," Zuko said, which came out croaky in his surprise. Standing side by side, the other man was broad shouldered and a little taller and _muscled_. Muscled in a way Zuko wasn't quite used to and certainly didn't expect from someone in a poetry class, and it was doing something stupid to his brain.

"Sokka Amaruq," the man supplied, smiling, and his smile was wide and white in the smooth planes of his face. "From Professor Iroh's poetry class?"

As if Zuko could possibly not remember him. 

"Yeah, um, hi," he replied eloquently. Too bad he was only eloquent in writing, or when talking about writing. No wonder it had been so long since he'd been on a date. "I'm Zuko. Zuko Aki."

"Zuko," Sokka repeated, still smiling. "Great to meet you officially! I like the way you talk about poetry."

Sokka's expression twitched with embarrassment and he rubbed at the back of his neck, but Zuko actually shot him a smile, fascinated and charmed by the odd man beside him. He couldn't have said why except that something about him was magnetic.

"Yeah, you too," he said and then added before he thought it through, before he reasoned his way out of it, "You wanna grab a coffee?"

Sokka met his eyes again, and they were so bright and beautifully blue, so full of genuine interest and excitement. 

"I'd love to," Sokka replied. "I don't have class again until three so yeah, I've got time if you do. Student center?"

Zuko nodded and they headed off together, and the whole walk, part of him was only aware of Sokka. The chance to study him further, take him in via parts and wholes: the glint of a stud in his earlobe, the shading of his shaved head and the short, swept back ponytail of the rest of his hair except for a few strands around his face, the slope of his dark eyebrows and the fringe of his black lashes. Zuko wasn't sure why he was so drawn in, so fixated on understanding him and watching him and finding a way to write him.

But he was, and he couldn't deny it. 

Granted, some of his interest was less than intellectual, based if nothing else on the way Zuko's eyes also kept getting pulled to the muscles in Sokka's thighs through his tight jeans and the shape of his hands and long fingers, especially when he ran a thumb along his lower lip as he looked up at the coffee menu at the campus cafe. It made his stomach drop a little, thinking about that thumb and that mouth, about those hands rubbing against skin.

Zuko jerked his eyes away long enough to order a basic latte and then step back to wait for their orders.

"So what's your major?" Sokka asked suddenly, catching his attention again.

"Oh, English Lit, actually," he replied. "What about you?"

"Engineering," Sokka replied with a smile and when Zuko's eyebrow rose in surprise, he added, "Yeah, I know, why am I in a poetry class then, right?"

Zuko scratched the back of his head."I mean, kinda?" he replied, still as articulate and charming as always. He wished he could kick himself. 

But Sokka just smiled again, those wide, easy smiles like Zuko could barely fathom. Had life just been… easy for him? Was that how he could go through the world this way?

"I've always really liked poetry," Sokka answered while Zuko was still enchanted by his damn face. "Poetry and art and all that good stuff. My brain might be geared for science but my heart," he gave a dramatic, wistful sigh and put a hand on his chest, "was made for the humanities."

Zuko couldn't resist returning that smile, like it was contagious, infectious. Who _was_ this guy? How did he live like this?

They got their drinks and headed to a table, where Sokka pulled off his coat to reveal a truly distracting torso just barely obscures by a blue-patterned sleeveless shirt: strong arms, one with a curling tribal tattoo all around his tricep and shoulder, the smooth lines of his forearms, a few bracelets around his wrists, and then, even more distracting, the collarbones visible between the sleeves of the tank, the muscles leading up to his neck, the white choker around the base of his throat. Christ, how could one man be so _devastating_? Either that, or Zuko was just even more hard up than he'd realized (it had been a few months after all since he'd been with anyone, let alone that year since his last tragically-stupid relationship) and Sokka was just handsome and charming and friendly enough to make Zuko want to spread him across this damn table right now. Could he, if he somehow managed to keep his heart out of it? Because my god, those collarbones and that mouth--

He really hoped this wasn't showing on his face, because, seriously, the guy had just taken his _coat_ off. But if it was, Sokka didn't seem to mind and sipped at his own coffee and occasionally smiled Zuko's way. Zuko should probably talk, right? That was what normal people did, not get strangled by their own horny thoughts.

"So what kind of poetry do you like?" he managed, which was a pretty lame question, and took a drink of his own coffee. 

Sokka nodded and licked a bit of foam off his upper lip, which Zuko's body reacted to considerably more than it should have. Definitely just hard up. 

"Well, I've read a lot of the classic stuff in school--Shakespeare and Dickinson and Whitman and stuff, but I actually prefer more modern, experimental stuff usually," Sokka offered. "A little more informal and introspective and vivid, you know?"

God, Zuko could watch him talk for hours. Just the brightness in his eyes and the way those lips formed words. He'd never had such a reaction to someone saying the word 'introspective' before, but maybe that was what college did to him. Still, he managed to nod and smile. 

"I agree, actually," he said. "I mean, I'll still always have a soft spot for writers like Browning and Donne--"

"Hence calling that dumbass out for being dense about 'The Sun Rising'?" Sokka interjected, and Zuko grinned, a bit embarrassed at his previous outburst. 

"Yeah, that's part of it," Zuko replied.

"Hey, if you hadn't, I would've," Sokka offered, "but sorry, you were talking. What else do you like?"

It was said with such genuine interest, it was almost jarring. But Zuko did find it strangely easy to talk to him, discuss the other classes he'd taken and poets he enjoyed and the other ones he thought sucked, all while skirting away from mentioning that he attempted to be a poet himself. That was too weird to share, and especially now that he couldn't write for shit, he didn't exactly want to talk about it either. But he sipped his coffee and went off about Langston Hughes and Mohja Kahf and Sherman Alexie, emboldened by the fact that, the whole time, those blue eyes were trained on him. That expressive face kept nodding and smiling, forehead wrinkling, eyebrows rising, as if this was truly fascinating stuff. It was like being held safely in the eye of a storm. 

"But, um," Zuko finally said, "I'm talking a lot, sorry."

"Don't apologize!" Sokka said immediately. "No one ever wants to talk poetry with me like this, and now here _you_ are, dumped in my lap like magic." Another wide smile, and Zuko swallowed and nodded and tried not to get blown over.

"So what about you?" he asked. "Who are the modern poets you like then? Anyone I'd have heard of?"

Sokka took another drink of his coffee and then said, "Well, my _favorite_ poet is sort of obscure actually." He tapped his fingers against the cardboard cup and added, "I think he's actually even local, although it's hard to know with the pen name. Ever heard of the Blue Spirit?"

Zuko, who'd taken a drink assuming it was safe to do so, suddenly choked on his latte and gagged. Which of course led to coughing and covering his mouth and trying not to make an absolute, disgusting fool of himself.

"Oh shit, you ok?" Sokka asked, reaching for his arm, and Zuko waved a hand and pounded on his chest and managed to settle again. 

"Yeah sorry," he croaked. "Just--wrong tube."

"Aww man," Sokka said. "Want me to grab you a water or something?"

Zuko waved a hand again. "Nah, I'm ok. Sorry about that!"

"Oh, you're fine. Shit happens," Sokka said, seeming genuine again, "but yeah, all I was saying was this Blue Spirit, he's really secretive and sort of unknown, so I wasn't sure if you'd heard of him."

"Um, I'm… not sure," Zuko hedged, hoping his face wasn't too terribly red. 

What was he _supposed_ to say? 'Oh yeah, that's me actually, the awkward dude who's been bombarding you with poetry opinions and staring at you in secret for weeks?' God, it was too weird and pathetic a thought to actually articulate.

"Well you should totally check him out!" Sokka said excitedly, unaware of Zuko's inner turmoil. "Seriously, his stuff is so raw and different, and it's like he just stares right into your soul somehow. I've read his book, _Banished and Burning,_ like, five times. I'll loan it to you if you want!"

Zuko managed a smile. "Yeah--wow--that's--sure, that sounds good," he finally said, confused and flustered by the far-too-generous praise, and Sokka smiled even broader again. 

The eye of a storm had been right. If Zuko moved a step out of line, he'd be overwhelmed completely.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A note on names: 
> 
> I am definitely a white person, and for that reason, recognize that even if I'm doing my best to write POC character correctly, there may be flaws there that I can't recognize because of my position. However, I did try to find ethnically appropriate last names for the characters, even if I kept their decidedly not ethnically natural eye colors to connect back to canon:
> 
> Amaruq is an Inuit name meaning "wolf"  
> Aki is a Japanese name with a number of meanings, but the one I focused on was "bright" 
> 
> I chose both these names for ethnicity but also, obviously, for meanings that connected to the characters in canon. Hopefully they make sense and work well enough in the world I've constructed here!
> 
> A note on references poems:
> 
> Anything written by the Blue Spirit is just my own poetry (revised or newly written to match this story), but everything else is from the poets listed below each quote. If you want me to actually footnote or otherwise list the names of the poems being referenced, feel free to let me know and I'll see what I can do :)
> 
> Thanks again all for reading!


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sokka and Zuko's friendship and attraction deepens and then turns to something more.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning:  
> Semi-sexual making-out starts after the dialogue line '"Yes," he said immediately, without hesitation" if you prefer to skip from there. If you're just concerned about avoiding the non-explicit smut, that starts after the line '"Then what've we been doing all this damn time?" Sokka almost growled.' If you do choose to skip these parts, next chapter picks up after the fact, and all you really need to know is that the boys are very into each other and Zuko spouts some poetry about how damn hot he thinks Sokka is (which Sokka just accepts as very specific dirty talk and does not connect to Zuko's actual identity). 
> 
> Hope that makes sense, and hope you enjoy! Thanks so much for reading!

_When I too long have looked upon your face,_

_Wherein for me a brightness unobscured_

_Save by the mists of brightness has its place,_

_And terrible beauty not to be endured,_

_I turn away reluctant from your light,_

_And stand irresolute, a mind undone,_

_A silly, dazzled thing deprived of sight_

_From having looked too long upon the sun._

\-- Edna St. Vincent Millay

Zuko was… weird. That was for sure. He oscillated strangely between full info dumps when he got going, speaking quickly and passionately and sarcastically, with a wealth of facial expressions and hand gestures. But then in the next breath he’d be closed off and quiet and awkward about sharing something as simple as how long he’d been in school or why he’d chosen English Literature. His face tended toward aggression, all those sharp lines and angles, and yet it didn’t seem to match the underlying demeanor entirely, the supple way his tongue formed words or the vivid intelligence in his eyes. For the intense appearance, he was surprisingly casual and easy-going, willing to come along to grab coffee when Sokka asked, up for wandering with him around campus or hunkering down with him in the library to study. They had more in common than not, somehow, considering side by side they probably looked about as different as possible, and conversation just came _easily_ , like they'd known each other for years, not weeks. His dry, sharp wit made Sokka laugh, and he actually asked for Sokka's thoughts, listened intently and gave opinions. He let Sokka bitch about his sister when he needed to, and he recommended books Sokka actually enjoyed, and he smiled while Sokka went off on tangents about poems no one else would have possibly cared about.

But Zuko cared. And Sokka cared too. 

Yet Zuko's physical appearances, the thick jackets and dark clothes, the shaggy hair and the scar around his eye, the chipped black nails and rings on his slim fingers and the chains around his neck, it all projected something prickly and rough and about keeping others at a distance. It wasn't a _bad_ look at all--it actually worked well with his long limbs and slim fingers and made that insane molten color of his eyes stand out even more--but it also didn't match entirely. Like it was a disguise rather than a style choice. Like he was hiding something Sokka didn't understand. But sometimes he gave Sokka these smiles so soft and sweet and almost longing that Sokka felt like the only person in the world, like he'd been gifted something unfathomable and precious. Other times, Zuko smirked or teased or ran his fingers backwards through his hair and Sokka about leapt across the damn library table just to get his tongue in that mouth. He _didn't_ of course, but that didn't mean the thought didn't skitter across the back of his mind.

So yeah… the accidental sort of friendship they’d struck up was both very enjoyable and deeply confusing. But it had just sort of happened, and Sokka saw no reason to stop.

After the next poetry class, Sokka had simply asked again if he wanted to get coffee and Zuko had said yes and from then on, it was just a kind of ritual. After Professors Iroh’s class, they walked together to the student center and ordered their drinks and talked about class and their recent assignments and events around campus. They brainstormed paper topics and bickered about interpretations and shared what they’d been reading or watching recently. Sokka did a lot of the talking, because that was how he was, and Zuko watched him with those vivid eyes, always tracking his face, flicking across his features like he was watching each muscle Sokka moved as he spoke. It should have been disconcerting, being looked at like someone was about to dissect him, but because it was Zuko, it wasn’t. Somehow, even with the appearance and the closed off nature, Sokka found he just wanted to know him more. 

So sure, he was weird. But Sokka tended to like weird. He was hardly a cookie-cutter sort of person himself, so he liked other people who were like that too. And boy, was Zuko like that.

Every time Sokka thought he had a read on him, had snooped out some personal detail about his family or his past or his background, Zuko would dodge and weave and throw him off again. He'd grown up with two parents--but no, he'd been raised by his uncle as an only child--but not, because he actually had a sister--but then nope, he had a younger sister and an even younger half-sister--but actually, he was basically on his own completely--and on it went, running Sokka ‘round and ‘round as he tried to piece him together into some recognizable whole.

Sokka, comparatively, was quite a bit simpler. He shared a rental house with his sister while they were both in school. He had a dad who was the mayor of their hometown three states away. He’d lost his mom as a kid. Rather than focusing on the lack of real, biological family he had, he’d taken to collecting found-family everywhere he went and stuck with them, a widely spread network of people Sokka connected to and loved and supported. He threw himself hook, line, and sinker into the things he enjoyed.

Which, right now, included his odd, new friendship with Zuko.

And friendship was fine, even if Sokka did find himself accidentally wondering what Zuko's chest might look like under his long sleeve shirts and jackets, how much his lips would still taste like coffee if Sokka kissed them, what those narrow, ringed hands would feel like pulling on his hair. These were, of course, not at all appropriate things to he thinking while pretending not to watch the guy in his poetry class and losing track of the discussion of word choice in Anne Bradstreet. But he couldn't help it. When Sokka fell for people, he fell hard and fast and hit every damn tree limb on the way down. And he'd fallen hard, intentionally or not, for Zuko.

So yeah, sometimes Sokka just wanted to kiss him and see for sure if those sideways glances and lifted smiles meant anything more than friendship. But now that it had been over a month of their multi-week coffee hangouts, layered with additional around campus time, he also didn't want to risk this new, delicate friendship they had. He wanted to keep listening to him go off about how Robert Frost was a poser and grumble about his required Comp class and laugh at Sokka's stupid jokes like he was always surprised he could laugh at all.

Wanting to taste that sexy mouth wasn't quite worth the risk of losing all that.

When Midterm paper assignments came around, Sokka actually stayed after class to ask Professor Iroh about doing his essay on a poem by the Blue Spirit.

"I know it's not technically in our textbook, but I really think I could make an interesting claim about use of imagery and the depiction of the speaker versus the unknown nature of author, so I could--"

"That," Professor Iroh said with an oddly giddy smile, "sounds like a fascinating essay topic. Just send me an email with the actual title of the chosen poem and be sure you can still create an MLA citation for it."

"Oh," Sokka said, smiling, "yeah of course. Thank you!" 

There was still something confusingly mischievous in his old professor's eyes as he said, "I look forward to reading it," but Sokka wasn't terribly concerned with that now. 

What he was concerned with was grabbing his backpack and hoping by some thin chance that Zuko had hung around for him for their usual coffee date. Well, not _date_ exactly, but Sokka had come to really look forward to them. But Zuko had no real reason to wait for him, not really. It wasn't anything official, nothing they'd talked about, so he'd probably be gone, didn't have the same investment as Sokka in this whole thing--

Zuko was still waiting in the hallway, leaned against one wall and typing out something on his phone. He looked up as Sokka appeared, and the flash of smile that rose in his face and slid into his eyes was enough to make Sokka a little bit dizzy. Like feeling the sun just begin to peek out over the horizon after he'd been lost in the dark all night.

"Hey you wanna come over tonight?" he asked before he thought it through, and Zuko's eyes widened a little. "To work on our papers, I mean!" Sokka added quickly. "Maybe brainstorm and start doing research or something?"

God, this was making Sokka sound like a truly dedicated student, which he really wasn't. But it was as good an excuse as any to spend more time with him, get away from just seeing each other on campus.

"Um…" Zuko said, still watching him in surprise, "sure. Yeah, that sounds great."

"Cool!" Sokka said, overeager. "Coffee still?"

"Absolutely," Zuko said and fell into step beside him. 

***

_Lover, unstitch my seams and parse me out into digestible elements. Fire-tongued, earth-hearted, water-bled, air-woven._

_Hold me up to the light and look through me, see me, know me._

_I am a totem in your hands. I only make magic at your touch._

\-- the Blue Spirit

Zuko took the bus and walked the last three blocks to the address Sokka had given him, which was a little, old two-story house with a screened in porch and a blue front door. He hadn't known what to wear so he'd stuck with safety--slim black jeans, black henley, black jacket, black nails which he'd already bitten down and chipped with nervousness because, really, he wanted a cigarette but he wasn't doing that. He'd added his rings and a simple necklace and felt he was sufficiently ready, covered, protected. He was definitely overthinking this, because Sokka probably didn't have fever-inducing dreams about him like Zuko did. Sokka was just friendly--flirty and fun and outgoing because that was his personality, not because of _Zuko_. So this was a chance to hangout and study away from campus, nothing else. 

Which was _good_ because Zuko didn't want anything else. Obviously.

Still, he hefted his messenger bag on his shoulder and knocked a few times on the front door.

A guy with a bald head and a blue tattoo swooping over his scalp and down his forehead opened it, looking quizzical. 

"Oh, um," Zuko said immediately, "is this where Sokka Amaruq lives or am I at the wrong place?"

"Oh hi!" the tattooed teen said brightly, face breaking into a smile. "Yeah, this is where Sokka and Katara live! And sorta me a lot of the time too."

"Uh, ok," Zuko said, because this guy still hadn't opened the door, which meant Zuko was still loitering on the porch. "Can I… come in then?"

"Right, of course! I'm Aang, by the way, Katara’s boyfriend," the guy said, pulling open the door and then yelled over his shoulder, "Hey Katara! Sokka's guy is here! Do you know where he is?"

'Sokka's guy,' Zuko thought to himself, unsure what that meant as he followed Aang inside and to the base of a creaky white staircase. But it made him oddly nervous in a pleasant way that twisted around in his stomach.

"Should be upstairs!" a feminine voice yelled from somewhere else in the house, and Aang motioned Zuko toward the stairs.

"His bedroom's the second door on the left," Aang said, "so he's probably there. We all try to keep to our own sections of the rental. You know how it is with siblings." 

He elbowed Zuko in the ribs, and Zuko definitely didn't know how it was since he lived by himself in a studio apartment on the top floor of an ancient building downtown, but sure. He nodded to Aang and headed up the stairs anyway, fist tight around the strap of his bag. Once there, he knocked on the correct door and waited, trying to process the prickle of his skin, the eagerness sizzling in his gut.

"Yes, Aang, fuck's sake!" came Sokka's voice as he yanked open the door. 

Shirtless, with his hair loose, and a white t-shirt swinging from his hand. 

Zuko looked. He definitely looked. God, that torso was even better with nothing on it, the curve of those pecs and a sharp line down the middle of his abs and that whole expanse of warm brown flesh tapering from shoulder to waist. There was a tattoo along the side of his ribs too, something partially hidden by how he was standing, and he still had the choker on, a starkly contrasting white against his skin. Zuko swallowed and jerked his eyes up, and Sokka looked startled as he stepped back. 

"Zuko! Hey! So sorry!" He yanked the shirt over his head and smoothed it down his stomach. "Shit, am I late?"

Zuko couldn't form words, but luckily Sokka just checked the clock on his wall and swore again. 

"Damn, I _am_ kinda late," he muttered, "but hey, you're here!" he added with a smile. "Ready to, uh, talk about some essay topics?"

Zuko's mouth was dry and his brain was fixated on wanting to reach under that shirt and run his fingertips over Sokka's skin and suck marks into the snippet of visible hipbone still showing between Sokka's shirt and the low-slung top of his jeans. Which was… bad. So bad. Because he wanted him like a coal lodged in the back of his throat. Apparently he at least managed to make some sort of affirmative noise, and Sokka gestured for him to come inside. Shit, keeping things platonic felt like hell, but did he dare make a move knowing full well he wasn't a "boyfriends" kind of guy? He really didn't know, and he felt like he was clinging to drift wood and being tossed around at sea.

Thankfully, Sokka took over making conversation, explaining about living with his sister and basically his sister's boyfriend too, about the rental house and his chunk of rooms upstairs. Zuko did realize there was only one place to sit, though, which was Sokka's double bed with its blue and grey comforter stretched on top, and so they both ended up there side by side with their backs to the wall. The room was small and white, with a crack running up the ceiling and a few sparse pieces of furniture against the walls. But the room felt like Sokka somehow, the art hung up beautiful but contradictory in colors and styles, the furniture pulled somewhere between antique and modern, everything sort of softened and loved with his interest, his presence.

But maybe Zuko was just projecting, and he made himself take a breath.

After a bit of more normal, casual conversation, they finally started pulling out books and laptops and chatting about the assignment. Zuko managed to articulate that he wanted to do some sort of compare/contrast but wasn't sure what poems to choose. That at least felt like more even footing, like their old rhythm and the dance steps Zuko knew how to follow. Sokka listened and nodded as he went through a stack of books on his bedside table only to emerge with a well-worn copy of _Banished and Burning,_ which made Zuko's stomach lurch and his words fall silent.

"Yeah, Professor Iroh's letting me do a Blue Spirit poem for my paper," Sokka explained with a smile to whatever Zuko's expression was, "so I'm trying to decide exactly which one."

He leaned over to show Zuko the book, annotated and ear-marked and supple with wear, and paged back and forth over the poems. Zuko couldn't tear his eyes away from them, his bizarre soul-bleed on the paper, underlined and analyzed in Sokka's quick, small handwriting. The circles around words, the rhetorical questions in the margins, the underlines and arrow drawn to connect ideas. Sokka was still talking excitedly, pointing out pages and flipping between them, and Zuko could barely hear him. He was caught instead completely on those hands on his book, those fingers sliding between the pages, the graphite and pen scattered across those stanzas that Zuko had written at 3am or on napkins during work or at times when he wanted to smoke or scratch off the scar on his face but couldn't do either. Poems he'd wrestled into shape and reworked, poked and rewritten and cut apart and pasted back together. And here was this copy that had been so held and loved and worked by those gorgeous hands, got to sit beside where this man slept at night, got to be observed however often by those blue eyes. 

There must have been something in his face, because Sokka finally stopped and flushed just barely. 

"Sorry," he said quickly. "I know I can go a little overboard once I start talking and that's probably way more than you ever wanted to hear--"

"No!" Zuko said immediately, finding his eyes again. "No, it's amazing! I love listening to you--seriously, I could listen to you talk forever. You're just, you're so…" 

But there were not any words, and he was saying too much already. There was nothing he could grab on to except to stare, to let his eyes drift down to Sokka's soft lips and linger as he softly tongued his own. He'd never been so aware of each curve, each line in the shape of someone else's mouth, and Zuko had to return to those impossible eyes after a moment. Which wasn't better, because they were vivid, the pupils dark, his own tiny reflection staring back. 

He was thrown, letting himself go under.

Sokka moved in an instant, rotating and catching his face and slamming their mouths together in an earth-shattering sort of kiss. It was like something had gone off in Zuko's skin at that kiss, the feel of those lips fitting against his, that hand holding his face, and he brought his own hand up and made a fist in the front of Sokka's shirt. Sokka's tongue slipped against the seam of Zuko's lips, and he let his own dart out to meet it, steal a further taste of that mouth, and Sokka actually gave a small groan. 

"You like boys, right?" he whispered, only moving his mouth off Zuko's enough to speak but not enough that they weren't still sharing the same air. 

"Yes," Zuko said immediately, tightening his hold on Sokka's shirt, "god yes." 

He moved back in to kiss him again, swipe his tongue into his mouth once more, and Sokka made another of those groans that turned everything a little tight and blurry at the edges. He rotated more, pressing into him, and Sokka shifted to accommodate. His hands moved to the shoulders of Zuko's jacket and pulled, attempting to free his arms, and Zuko moved to help him. 

"So you want--you'd be into--" Sokka began, and Zuko kissed him harder.

"Yes," he said immediately, without hesitation (consequences were for future Zuko), and reached up to run his fingertips along the texture of Sokka's scalp. "Everything. You. Any of it."

Sokka actually chuckled a little and tossed Zuko's jacket on the floor.

"God, I want you in my mouth," Sokka murmured, kissing him again, and Zuko slid his hands under the hem of his shirt, over the sweep of hot skin. 

"Yes," Zuko groaned back in response. 

"I want you fucking _everywhere_ ," Sokka continued with a near growl as he went for the hem of Zuko's shirt too, trying to pull it off. 

"Yes. Good. Me too," Zuko replied, helping him remove it and taking his necklace with it, the whole tangle thrown on the floor. Then yanked at Sokka's shirt too, feral and maybe a little desperate. 

Then that torso was bare, and Zuko immediately moved his hands to cover it, to feel the ridges of muscle and the brush of hair, the way Sokka gasped when his hands slid over a nipple, the way his muscles flexed as Zuko moved a hand around his back. And Zuko couldn't stop, had to touch all of it while it was actually here, had to kiss and lick into Sokka's mouth while his hands moved over his skin. He was hot to the touch, silken and perfect and setting Zuko's blood on fire. He leaned back so Zuko was over him just a little, pressing him into the pillows and the headboard as he continued to touch. Sokka kissed back and muttered curses into his mouth and reached up to hold Zuko’s face. Zuko made a noise, startled by the movement, and Sokka immediately stopped. 

"Sorry, I--is it your...?" he asked, drawing back to look at him.

The scar. Zuko wished he didn’t have to think about it, didn’t have to remember it, be aware of it there like a damn brand on his face. As if the narrowing of his vision on that side wasn’t enough, but he just wanted Sokka to still want him, be with him... 

"No," Zuko said immediately, kissing the corner of Sokka’s beautiful, careful lips. "No, it's good. Kiss me, Sokka. Touch me."

Sokka held his face, maybe still a little gentler, but kissed him hard again, tongue sliding into his mouth. Reassured, Zuko kissed back, leaned into him, felt their twin heartbeats hammering, his breath caught in his chest. Sokka’s hands moved, down the back of his neck, over his collarbones, down his chest, and Zuko let his own hands slide lower. Emboldened, he went for the button at the top of his jeans, fumbling to get them open, bare more of that skin, bare the hardness he was aware of there. 

"Condom," Sokka said into his mouth. 

"Do you have one?" Zuko asked, stilling with his hands still on either side of his partially open fly. 

"Side drawer," Sokka said. "Got whatever we might want."

Zuko slid his hands down to those strong thighs, over his hips, partially teasing and partially waiting for permission.

"What do you want?" he asked, and Sokka smiled into the kiss. 

"Fucking god, I want _you,_ " Sokka groaned, digging his hands into Zuko's back. "Wanted you for _weeks_."

"Me too," Zuko replied honestly because _fuck_ was it true, especially feeling Sokka's hand slide over his hips, move toward the zipper of his jeans too.

"Then what've we been doing all this damn time?" Sokka almost growled, and undid Zuko's pants and slipped his right hand inside.

Zuko was burning at Sokka's perfect fucking hands, sliding over him and holding him and coaxing impossible noises off his tongue. He was going insane with getting to taste Sokka's mouth and his jawline and his throat and his collar and his nipples and the line of his abs. He found the tattoo on his ribs, some beautiful and abstract image of a moon and waves and clouds, and he traced his tongue over a few of those lines, still panting at Sokka's hand around him. Sokka groaned too, but then removed his hand and pressed it flat to Zuko's chest, pushing him back. Zuko stopped immediately and drew away, worried he'd done something wrong, overstepped or hurt him somehow, or that Sokka had realized this was a mistake--

Sokka's eyes were still dark and hot, and he sat up and kissed him once more before smiling and standing up. He motioned Zuko to join him.

"Just want these off of us both," he murmured, tugging at the belt loops of Zuko's pants once he was standing, "but fuck, don't _actually_ stop."

"Ok good," Zuko said and caught his face again and pulled him into as searing a kiss as he could manage. 

Even kissing back, Sokka's hands were still working off his clothes, and he eventually did have to bend down to work his pants off the rest of the way. But that put him in a position to kiss at Zuko's stomach and hips and thighs, making him shudder, and then Sokka got the rest of his clothes off and pushed him back to sitting on the bed. But he didn't join him and instead slid to kneeling between his legs, watching him with those eyes, still so blue they didn't seem possible, shouldn't be possible. His hands were on Zuko's thighs, splayed out and warm, and he was too perfect, the tilt of that face and the part of those lips. Zuko reached out, almost hesitant, to stroke just above the choker still on his throat, up to his jaw, over his cheek, and Sokka's eyelids fluttered as he leaned into the gentle touch. 

"My god, you're so beautiful," Zuko murmured, unable to contain it, wanting a moment, even with his heart hammering, to just take in the sight before him. This man, this impossible man, on his knees before someone like Zuko. 

And Sokka actually looked _surprised_ by the praise, which was unbelievable, and paused to smile, just a little.

"So are you, gorgeous," he replied after a moment, reaching up to run a fingertip down Zuko's torso, making him shiver. "Fuck, I've wanted to touch you, wanted to see what sounds you'd make, wanted to feel your hands…"

Zuko shivered again at the low murmur of his voice, those eyes still watching his face. Sokka licked his upper lip.

"Can I taste you?" he asked, hands sliding toward Zuko's inner thighs.

"Yes," Zuko rasped, whole body shaking. "God yes, please, fuck, I'll beg if you want."

And Sokka actually laughed, which was also such an incredible noise, and he grabbed one of Zuko's hands and set it on the top of his head where it could sink into the loose wash of hair there.

"No need to beg," Sokka muttered and dipped his head.

Zuko made a broken sort of noise at that and used his free hand to cover his mouth, remembering the other's downstairs. Sokka's mouth was too good, the heat and tenderness, his own hums of enjoyment rippling through Zuko too, and Zuko bit his own hand to keep his cries in. But Sokka drew back after a moment and looked up at him.

"You don't have to do that," he murmured, smiling as he licked his lips. "I wanna hear you."

"Yeah, but… people," Zuko managed, stroking his fingers into Sokka's soft hair with his other hands, unable to stop himself. 

"They're gone by now," Sokka said securely, "so let me hear the sounds you make for me, baby. Wanna hear you _talk_. Want you to say my name." He smiled to himself and pressed a kiss to Zuko’s inner thigh. "Want you to write your own poetry about how good it feels." 

Then he set to work again, and Zuko panted up at the ceiling.

"Fuck, Sokka, yes, I will," he gasped, feeling the burn of it in his soul. "Could write a whole poem just about your incredible fucking mouth if I could find the damn words."

Sokka hummed in approval and drew back again, pressing kisses along his thighs, hands following after, parting them further.

"Keep going, gorgeous," he whispered, almost a purr, and his hands slid around Zuko's sides, nails skimming over his skin. "Tell me what you'd say. Tell me what you'd write for me."

He was impossible. He was everywhere at once somehow, and Zuko couldn’t breathe for wanting him.

"Sokka, I…" Zuko groaned, leaning back, "there aren't words for your hands either--I'd write pages about those hands." The hands holding him steady as Sokka dipped down again, pressing into his hips so he couldn't buck upward. "Want them on me, everywhere, _fuck_."

One hand slid up over Zuko's stomach then, drifting over the skin, and then back down to his hip. Zuko choked on his words again as Sokka's mouth continued to move, the pacing so good, making his insides boil. He couldn't stand it, couldn't make coherent thoughts, felt everything sizzling through his nerves. He stroked his fingers into Sokka's soft hair and looked down at him, the angle of his face, the brush of his eyelashes against his cheekbones. 

"Look at me," Zuko groaned, and those eyes flickered up to meet his immediately, nothing else in his face moving.

Zuko could die now with that image ingrained in his consciousness, the vivid blue cutting into his soul. Sokka, too beautiful, too good, on his knees and looking up at him.

"Sokka… god, Sokka… could write _books_ about those eyes. Could drown in those beautiful eyes and die fucking happy," he told him, and watched Sokka smile as much as he could and then slowly slide off of him. Zuko groaned again and squeezed his eyes shut.

"God," Sokka murmured, kissing at his hips and then catching the hand Zuko had in his hair and kissing that too, "you… this is next level. I'd fantasizes about what you might say, but _fuck_ Zuko…" 

He shifted up to stand again, and Zuko took that opportunity to pull him out of his remaining clothes too, working off jeans and underwear, even reaching up to undo the choker just in case. Sokka chuckled as he did so, catching his hands. 

"Should I get these off you too?" he asked, spinning one of Zuko's rings.

"If, uh, if you want to," Zuko murmured in response.

Sokka chuckled. "Maybe I do," he said. "Maybe I want more of these hands," and began sliding off each ring, pausing to kiss at each finger as he did so until Zuko was breathing hard again. Sokka set the handful of rings on his bedside table and turned back, and finally Zuko could just take him in. That taut waist and those hip bones and thighs, the sheer, almost paralyzing beauty of this man standing before him like some sort of dream, some apparition. 

Zuko reached out, cautious, like Sokka might disappear at his touch. But Sokka just smiled down at him, watching with low-lidded eyes, so Zuko slid his bare hands over the silky curves of muscle spanning from Sokka's sides down over his hips, watching his own pale hands on that gorgeous body. Nothing between them. Heat passing from skin to skin. He looked back up at Sokka's face. 

"God, can I…?" he began, but didn't even know what he wanted.

Everything. For this evening to absolutely never end. To never have to question anything beyond this moment. To touch and kiss every inch of that skin, to feel Sokka move against him. Then to somehow make Sokka eternal with words, find some way to capture him so he'd always be just like this, just as strong and beautiful and ocean-deep.

"Yes," Sokka said anyway, laying him back in the bed so he could crawl over top of him, their lips together again. "Yes, Zuko, yes."


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A book of poetry is shared, but secrets and burgeoning feelings are not...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A bit of sexual content here too starting with the line "Zuko, who kept coming back to his house to study," although shorter and less detailed than previous. Still figure I should offer the warning just in case :)

_ then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.  _

\-- James Joyce

Sokka was breathing hard, sweaty and warm and somewhere in the realm of euphoric. Zuko, who had ended up splayed across him, seemed to be in the same state, and Sokka just kept running his hand up and down Zuko's narrow back, completely unconcerned by the mess between or around them. The books and laptops had all been kicked on the floor, and they really hadn't been quiet, so Sokka was definitely hoping Katara and Aang had left like they said they would. If not, there might be some very weird conversations tomorrow. 

But for now, there was a man still laying boneless across his chest and everything else could wait.

Zuko muttered something that was maybe an attempt at a word or phrase and finally picked up his head.

"So you're saying," he muttered, as if mid conversation, while meeting Sokka's eyes, "we could have been doing this for  _ weeks _ ?"

"Apparently," Sokka replied, stroking the loose hair back from Zuko's face with a smile. "So you wanna do it again sometime?"

Zuko drew back a little more, bracing himself on Sokka's bare chest with a forearm.

"Can we still… get coffee and hang out?" he asked, looking briefly concerned, and Sokka didn't mean to but he couldn't hold in his laughter. 

"You think it's one or the other?" he asked, still grinning. "Because I'm more of a 'both' guy, myself."

Zuko smiled then too. "Ok, good, because  _ god _ you're hot," he said, dropping his cheek back against Sokka's chest, and Sokka laughed again, low and startled and overwhelmed.

God, so was Zuko. Of course Sokka had been attracted to him already in that abstract, schoolboy crush, got-a-thing-for-slim-artsy-looking-guys kind of way, although he's been more than willing to forgo all that in favor of just spending time with him if that’s how it worked out. But Zuko without all the layers between him and the world? Just that body, and those hands, and that  _ mouth _ ? Sokka had thought  _ friendship _ was good, but kissing him, touching him, feeling him, it was next level completely. Like all the things they already did--the conversation, the eye contact, the brush of shoulders, the arguments and laughter and shared passions--all pushed to their obvious and electric conclusion. Sokka slid a hand up Zuko's spine again, aware of each notch of bone against his palm, that whole sweep of sweat-touched skin.

"So…" Sokka ventured, moving so both hands were on Zuko's back, like that would ground him, "clearly I'm into you."

Zuko murmured a sort of assent into Sokka's chest, and Sokka could swear he felt something like a smile curl on Zuko's face where it lay against him.

"So, uh," Sokka went on, encouraged, "did you wanna… do something more official maybe?"

It was an awkward way to try to say 'Hey are we dating now?  _ Can  _ I date you? What do you want?' but his brain was too dopey for eloquence.

Zuko moved to look at him again, hair falling in his eyes. 

"We can't just… keep doing what we were doing? Plus sex? Isn't that what you meant by 'both'?" he asked. 

Before Sokka could answer, something odd came into Zuko's expression that Sokka wasn't sure how to translate, but it felt a bit like shutters closing, a lock being turned in a door. 

"Because if you meant, uh, something else," Zuko went on, eyes darting away, "I should tell you I... don't really do the whole 'boyfriends', 'relationship' thing." His face flashed through with concern, something cutting through the shut windows. "I'm sorry if you thought--I do like you too, but I just don't--maybe I shouldn't have--"

"No, friendship plus sex sounds great," Sokka said immediately, ignoring the lurch of disappointment in his stomach, the odd sadness at hearing that shut-down. "I'm good with whatever. I’m just into you, babe.”

Then he gave him a quick kiss, just to seal the deal, and finally did shift to move Zuko off of him. 

"We should clean up," he said as he untangled their limbs, and Zuko nodded and dropped his head back on a pillow again. 

Sokka tried not to let himself linger too long with that image in mind, Zuko loose-limbed and naked and in his bed. It stung, just a little, the halfway rejection, but it didn't have to. He could still have more than he'd had before, and that was good after all. They could talk poetry  _ and  _ fuck in Sokka's bed halfway on top of their homework. That seemed like a win-win, really. 

He stood up but, unlabeled whatever or not, he didn't want Zuko to think he had to leave now, that everything had changed. Really, he wanted him to stay as long as possible, so Sokka pulled up the blanket and tossed it over Zuko before he turned away. Zuko looked up at him in surprise but did cuddle under it, tucking it up around his chin, as Sokka shot him a smile. This was good. God it was good. He took off the condom and threw some clothes on again to head into the hallway. He still made quick work in the bathroom since Zuko tended to be dodgy and closed off, so who knew how he'd respond to this new arrangement? 

Sokka came back with a dampened towel to find Zuko still where he'd left him under the blanket. He was all tousled hair and those sharp, ever-observing eyes, one lean arm snaked out from under the covers.

"You're gonna have to do laundry," he said by way of greeting, and Sokka just laughed again.

"You wanna clean up too?" Sokka asked, holding out the towel, and Zuko pulled back the blanket again.

"Yeah, thanks," he said, wiping clean his chest and stomach. "Where's the bathroom?"

Sokka explained the directions and then gathered up the blanket and sheets and dumped them in the hamper while Zuko pulled on clothes and headed out into the hallway. Sokka managed to dig another blanket out of the trunk near his dresser, and he was smoothing that one out to make the bed back into a reasonable seating space when Zuko returned.

His hair was still messy, his face still a little pink, but he was back in his jeans and henley, covered again in black. But Sokka was drawn to his still-bare hands, to his kissed-red lips, to the way his eyes immediately oriented to find Sokka’s face. Unable to resist, Sokka took the couple steps toward him, slid a few fingers under Zuko's jawline, and brought their lips together again. He'd been right when he'd thought Zuko had a nice mouth, supple and clever and smooth, and he liked that the almost chaste kiss still lingered and shivered between them. Zuko didn't move away, just raised a hand to rest it gently on Sokka's waist.

"That ok?" Sokka asked as he pulled back to look at him. "Can I do that now?"

Zuko's smile was almost wistful. "God yeah, you can do that now."

"Ok good." He wanted to keep standing here or maybe bring him back to bed to cuddle, maybe put Zuko's head in his lap and run his fingers through his hair and trace lines over his face. Do something stupid and soft and not-them. 

Because this wasn't like that. It wasn't what Zuko wanted, and while Sokka knew he was a romantic, he respected boundaries when they were put in place. And Zuko had laid out a clear enough line, a division between "friends-with-benefits" and "relationship." Sokka took a step back.

"You want some food?" he asked with a push back toward normalcy. "I'm starving, and if we're still gonna study, I need to eat something."

"Uh, sure," Zuko said, and then the words seemed to catch up with him. "You still wanna study?" 

Sokka laughed again. "I mean, that  _ is _ why I invited you over. The sex was just an added bonus." He slid his tongue along his lower lip. "As long as that's cool with you and you wanna stay?"

Zuko hesitated a moment but then gave a loose sort of smile and a nod, and Sokka went off in search of snacks. When he returned, Zuko had his rings back on and was gathering their books up again, but he shot Sokka another smile as he entered. Sokka grinned back, stomach tangled up at the look in those eyes.

They did actually work on their essay topics and the required approval paragraph plus annotated bibliography due next week, and they ate chips out of the bag and drank some of Katara's sacred Diet Cokes and seemed almost like nothing had occurred between them. They were friends still, which was what mattered. A little part of Sokka had worried as soon as he'd gone for that kiss that this would suddenly ruin the nice thing they had going. But they'd clearly had a good time and were compatible, and Zuko still wanted to be able to hang out and be friends. So it was good, easy actually, to just let it go without further commitment or discussion.

Thankfully, Zuko seemed to be past any weirdness too. Did he do this a lot? Was Sokka just one in a long line of guys (people? Sokka still wasn't sure) getting to kiss those lips and hear him wax, filthy and poetic, in bed? Sokka watched him sit cross-legged on the blanket, furrow his brow at the poetry textbook, chew on the end of his pen, and didn't know. Then Zuko looked up at him with one of those smiles that slid up into his eyes, pen between his teeth, and Sokka decided it didn't matter. Whatever this was, it was still theirs. He leaned forward and asked Zuko if he thought this article from JSTOR was a reputable source and put any other worries out of his mind. They talked about Poe and Keats and Plath, about imagery and line breaks and symbolism, about other classes and other midterm assignments and other students, and Sokka remembered why he'd liked Zuko so much beyond just the attraction. 

Finally, when it was fully dark out the window and they'd eaten all the chips and somehow lost two different highlighters, Zuko checked his phone and said he should get going. 

"But I'll see you in class on Monday?" he asked, going a little awkward again.

"Sure," Sokka replied, and then pushed on. "Or… we could hang out sooner if you want. Watch a movie or get a drink or something?" He clarified a second later, "As friends?"

The side of Zuko's lips lifted. "Yeah. That'd be good too."

So they exchanged numbers, trading phones between them, and then found themselves hesitating again on this new, uncharted territory.

Sokka, before he lost his nerve and gave up on what had to be the truest expression of his affection, grabbed  _ Banished and Burning  _ off the bedside table again. He held it out, smiling just a little, hopefully not looking as nervous as he felt. Zuko blinked at him in surprise. 

"You, uh," Sokka said, "should borrow this. It's really good, and it means a lot to me, and I think--well, I hope you'd like it, you know, because it's um--"

But he didn't know what he was saying, when what he really wanted to say was, "Here, Zuko, these poems and my notes about them are the clearest reflection of my soul and my emotions. Hope that's cool. And maybe if you read them you'll want to date me for real." But no, he couldn't possibly say that, but at the same time, offering it, that meant something. Zuko would hopefully understand that, right? He understood poetry, how personal it became. He'd… he'd get it. 

Zuko accepted the book slowly, something strange and nervous in his eyes. Shit, was loaning a book of poetry too relationship-y a gesture? Sokka didn't know. 

"But you're paper? Don't you--wouldn't you need it?" Zuko said, back to wary, back to misfiring sentences.

"There's enough time, and, I mean, I've got enough notes outside of the book already on my laptop, I should be fine. Take as long as you want," Sokka said, trying not to show his concern, the worry for his favorite book and that odd version of his heart he was holding out.

Zuko nodded, staring down at the slim volume again, holding it carefully with both hands. 

"We'll just have to talk about it sometime when you're done--if you want," Sokka said quickly. "Hopefully my notes and stuff don't distract too much from the poems, but you can always ignore those. Just, you know, focus on the poetry itself." 

Zuko nodded once more, facial expression still inscrutable, flickering between emotions in the smallest ticks of his lips and his eyes and his jawline.

But he did carefully tuck the book into his messenger bag, showing it the reverence it deserved, so that was something. Then, finally, there was nothing else to do or share or pack up, so they had no more reason to linger, suddenly strange with each other.

Still, Sokka walked him down to the front door, where they both hovered for a little while, still unsure on this new footing. The entryway was dark and quiet, the house creaking and settling around them, but the silence between them was odd and palpable. That wasn't at all what Sokka wanted, because he wanted to kiss him before he left, wanted to at least hug him, wanted to tell him thanks and that he looked forward to seeing him again. He wanted at least  _ that _ little bit to have changed between them, but maybe it hadn't. 

But then Zuko took a step into his space, caught the back of his head, and kissed him. His lips were soft and sure and sweet, his hand warm on Sokka's skin, and something relaxed through Sokka's neck at his touch, at Zuko's exhaled sigh across his skin.

"I'm allowed to kiss you goodbye now, right?" Zuko whispered to his mouth, and Sokka smiled and kissed him back again.

"Definitely," he replied, "anytime. And I'll see you again soon."

***

_ I never learned to love myself--a skill untaught, instinct trained out of me by razor blade smiles. _

_ Loving myself is the dreamer lost in an unfamiliar city and searching, never knowing what it is they search for. Just that it's out there, waiting, out of reach. _

_ Acid-torn, unreadable, a burden I can't lift with these bone-scavenger's hands. _

_ Instead, can I know love by loving you? _

\--the Blue Spirit

For more than two weeks, Zuko carried Sokka's copy of his poetry book around in his bag, unable to pull it out and read it. It was too ridiculous to be true, that he'd been gifted a copy of his own book by someone he liked, filled with the guy's personal thoughts and reflections. It was enough of a gesture of intimacy to give someone your favorite book with all your notes in it, but for it to be  _ Zuko's words _ he was commenting on? Too much. 

But could he possibly tell him the truth now, after this long, after everything Sokka had said in his presence about the Blue Spirit? Had there been a correct moment to say something that he'd just missed? Or had it immediately gone too far and gotten too strange to navigate reasonably? He knew, deep down that he should say something even if it was the wrong time, that this was unfair to Sokka, but he found himself continuing to ignore those thoughts, bury them under ambiguity.

Really, he should give the book right back, chat pleasantly and distantly about the poems (it wasn't like he didn't know what was in them) and then move on and never bring it up again. Hope that skirted any awkwardness, kept this dance between them going without making it weird. He shouldn't read Sokka's private thoughts, not without him knowing who was really seeing them. 

But how could he resist, a heart presented to him with open palms, even if the giver didn't realize what they were offering?

So he accepted, sitting on his bed with a blanket wrapped around his shoulders, the all-too familiar book in his lap. Except it wasn't the same as those stiff, clean copies he still had in a box under his bed along with all his random paperwork and drafts. This was different. The black cover with its abstract smoke and fire mingling with the title, typically glossy and untouched, was softened and smudged with fingerprints. Sokka's fingerprints. Zuko swallowed and told himself to put the book away, that this wasn't  _ really _ what Sokka had agreed to, sharing his intimate thoughts with the actual author. But he couldn't stop himself and opened up the front cover, fingers careful on the pages. Sokka's name was scribbled in small letters on the inside cover along with a quick little key of his symbols and shorthand. Zuko swallowed and opened to the first poem, a short one he remembered writing when his eclectic ramblings had started to become a collection. He'd decided they needed something to pull them together, something to warn the reader what they were in for. He'd agonized over it for days, constantly typing and scribbling and rewriting, and now here it was, annotated with Sokka's diligent hand.

_ I don't know how much I can offer you besides this fire-licked heart.  _

_ I'd rather you supplied the stories, the answers to the questions caught in my throat like stones. Maybe you'll find the words I can't, the ones that turned to ash and crumbled in my hands. _

_ So I'll beg you again and again for responses you might give: tell me, tell me, tell me _

Zuko swallowed, seeing it written there. Sokka had underlined the phrase "fire-licked heart," which Zuko had changed and rewritten and changed back because sometimes it felt too distant and sometimes too close. But in the end, it had stayed there, only to be underlined by this pencil, a little note scribbled above it:  _ trial by fire? phoenix imagery? _ Sokka questioned. But now the roles had reversed and Zuko couldn't answer, couldn’t speak. Sokka had also circled the four uses of "you" and written  _ reader? character? separate self? _ , all of which were correct in their way. One poem, and Sokka had understood him, because the "you" throughout was all those things. He'd underlined "turned to ash" and drawn an arrow back up to "fire-licked heart" and added  _ title is present tense, these past tense - why? _

"Because I was burned," Zuko murmured to the invisible Sokka on the page, the one who didn’t know, couldn’t hear him, "but I'm also still burning."

His throat was tight, but he kept turning the pages. More notes and circles and drawings and smeared graphite: the note  _ god too real  _ next to the line "I am on an island in the dark, losing the difference between sky and sea. I could dissolve in either now," and the question  _ does everyone feel like this or just me and blue spirit?  _ next to the quote "I pick apart the loose threads of my self worth, looking for holes." There was more and more, Zuko's aches and fears and longings all spilled out on the page, words and phrases he's collected and knit together and peeled apart when there was no way to escape the emotion except to write it down. Poems he'd written on his third cigarette when his lungs were burning and all he could feel was fire. Lines that had come to him on the edge of sleep that he'd had to wake up to write down. Words he'd agonized over at his uncle's kitchen table, the tea he'd been offered growing cold. There were bits and pieces of narratives where he remembered the influences: his cousin, now past, showing him how to navigate with the stars; the first time post-restraining order when his sister had called and he'd heard that lightning-like voice again; the day he’d found Jet’s left-behind hoodie, soft and still smelling like smoke, and had sworn off relationships; his dad's hand slamming down on a kitchen table and making a young Zuko shake just like the dishes.

Zuko could see and feel them again, and they were interwoven now with Sokka. Sokka's loneliness and fears, his desires and questions. It was there in his underlines, the moments that had resonated with him, the words he tracked from poem to poem as ongoing metaphors, his half-questions referencing the author: who he was, what he'd felt as he was writing, how he dealt with it, who he loved. 

_ why do I feel like I know him? how's he somehow know me?  _ Sokka had written next to the last poem, one about being displaced and wishing for a home he'd never had, the one that gestured to his sense of self and self-worth and longing for connection. It ended with a hopeful twinge, though, a glimmer of Zuko's continued sliver of belief, and Sokka had underlined it darkly: 

_ New dawn in steel hues and life's reinvention, the constant moving target of  _ home  _ at the horizon line. Here is another chance to step to the edge. Another chance to step over.  _

_ You could come with me. _

_ Maybe this time we will rise. _

And there was Sokka's fragile self too, feeling it and understanding, those notes and underlines. It was in his rhetorical questions and crab-scuttle handwriting, in the finger-softened edges of the page. He was so much at once, too much at once for someone like Zuko, heart and body and mind and somehow, insanely, Sokka had known him from afar and found him in person anyway. Just thinking about him made something ache in Zuko's chest in a way he didn't entirely understand, hadn't felt in longer than he could remember. Sokka's cleverness, his humor, his interest, yet with these undercurrents of fear and loneliness clear in his notes. Sokka's hands on the page and on Zuko's skin, his water-bright eyes tracking words and movements, the curve of his lips as he spoke and read and laughed. It was… something different, this ache. Zuko stared at the page again. 

Oh.  _ Oh. _

Oh no. 

***

_ Though much is taken, much abides; and though _

_ We are not now that strength which in old days _

_ Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are, _

_ One equal temper of heroic hearts, _

_ Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will _

_ To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. _

\-- Alfred Lord Tennyson

Sokka was surprised how easy it was the first few weeks after they'd slept together. There were more coffee breaks and walks between classes and exchanges of lecture notes. It remained blissfully casual, their rhythm of shared interest and experiences, an unquestioned ability to follow the other's lead. They worked together, navigating inside jokes and returning arguments and constant conversation. It was just that now occasionally when they found a table in the darker, lower level of the library with no one else around, Sokka also imagined things they could do beyond work on their assignments.

"If I said I wanted to make out with you against a bookshelf right now," Sokka murmured, leaning forward on an elbow, "you'd say…?"

Zuko shot him a look. "We better not damage any books."

Sokka grinned. "That's your only concern?"

Zuko raised an eyebrow at him, something quick and bright in his eyes. "Yes."

So they kissed against a bookshelf, the air smelling of dust and bindings and ink, silent except for the hum of old lights and the stifled noises they made in case anyone else ventured down to their area of the library. Sokka had an exam for his Thermodynamics class that he really should be studying for instead of licking over Zuko's collarbone and pressing his thigh between his legs. But this was more fun by far, the mystery of Zuko. 

Because he was, at his core, still a damn mystery about anything simple. Sokka knew he worked sometimes in a tea shop, but he didn't know which one. He knew he had an apartment but didn't know what kind or where. He knew what types of foods and books and shows he liked but not where he was originally from. He didn't even technically know how old he was. He just knew how he thought and spoke, what he cared about and loved, the way his mouth tasted and his hands felt. Basically, it all should have made Sokka feel decidedly uncomfortable, all those questions and unknowns, not make him want to suck a mark right behind the other guy's ear until he groaned. But it didn't, because all the big stuff seemed to be enough.

It was probably also just because Sokka liked a good puzzle and was stubborn enough to try to figure it out. 

Or maybe, somehow, it was just because it was Zuko.

Zuko, who kept coming back to his house to study. Who at one point somehow morphed typing up their papers and yelling at MLA and drinking beers snuck up from downstairs into making suggestive comments and eyeing Sokka with lowered lids. Zuko, who teased and kissed and touched until Sokka’s whole body was shaking under his hands, shaking with the sensation of being pressed down into the mattress and having to kick the books aside. His skin sizzled every time Zuko touched him, every time his mouth closed around him, and Zuko just kept tantalizing and murmuring and watching his face until Sokka was literally  _ begging _ . And Zuko had given him everything, all strength and assurance. He'd been so incredibly careful with him while also continuing to praise, all compliments and comparisons, lips against skin and dexterous fingers. Sokka could have sobbed at his touch, almost did when Zuko finally met him with a blinding, glorious heat that had Sokka gasping. Then Zuko didn't tease, knew somehow exactly what he needed and pulled him against his chest and said his name over and over in his ear. 

He'd held him a while afterwards while Sokka was spilled out on his back and breathing hard, Zuko cocooned above him and stroking tenderly through his hair. As soon as Sokka managed to get his eyes to open and his breath to even out a little more, Zuko had immediately asked if he was ok, if everything had been good for him, fingers still gentle on his face. Even just that, the brush of a thumb across his cheekbone, made everything tingle again.

"Yes," was all Sokka could manage, looking up into that gorgeous, concerned face hanging above him. "Oh my god,  _ yes _ ."

"Just making sure," Zuko said, dropping kisses all over his face--his cheeks, his nose, his eyelids--before finally moving off him.

So he continued to be a damn surprise and an incredible mystery, one moment reserved and intellectual, the next powerful and in control, later sweet and tender. There were too many sides of him, too many of them unknown. 

God, Sokka wanted to know them all.

Zuko came back with a towel and, instead of handing it over, actually ran it smoothly over Sokka's bare skin. More shivers, more dangerous feelings.

"I can do that, you know," Sokka said, not moving to stop him even with the incredible intimacy of his touch.

"I know," was all Zuko said and continued to care for him.

Before he could straighten and leave again, Sokka caught his hand. Zuko's eyes were immediately there, still impossible and burning, and when Sokka tugged on his hand, he lowered his head and kissed him. It was tender and gentle, those damn perfect lips, and Sokka snuck his arms up to hold the back of Zuko's neck, pull him close again. He felt Zuko smile into the kiss just a little and then drew back. 

"You sure you're ok?" he asked, still smiling a little. "You're being awfully cuddly."

"I'm not allowed to enjoy the post-orgasm bliss?" Sokka teased back. "But yes, again, I'm fine. I don't do that  _ often _ but I have done it  _ before _ , so you can relax."

Zuko still leaned down and gave him one more swift kiss before he was gone again, and Sokka finally climbed out of the bed on shivering legs. He could still sense Zuko's presence somehow, though, the linger of him in the room, and he liked it. Liked that Zuko was coming back, even if he didn't want Sokka in quite the same way Sokka wanted him. At least he wanted him  _ somehow _ .

And then after they were clean and dressed once more, they returned side by side to the remade bed and retrieved their laptops. Ten minutes later, they were back to what they'd been doing and Zuko was checking Sokka's Works Cited page and helping him create the right in-text citations. They were back to dragging the blonde idiot from class and chatting about professors they'd both had, back to easy smiles and sitting side by side. If their hands sometimes lingered together, fingertips against the back of a hand, palm brushing against a wrist, neither acknowledged it. If every so often they leaned their shoulders together, neither said anything. If Sokka gave Zuko a very long, overly affectionate kiss before he headed home for the night, well, neither complained about that either.

Sokka did wonder then, once Zuko was gone, if he’d read the poetry book yet. Still, he didn't ask, because this was good and Sokka wasn't about to upset whatever balance they'd struck.

And then, abruptly, Zuko was closed off again. Sokka wasn't sure where the change had occurred, no outward reason for why he'd shut down. Sokka watched him, considering--classes? work? family?--but never found an answer. At least they still kept their same rhythm of coffee dates and study times, but Zuko was different. Quieter. Distant. Even more shields up between himself and the rest of the world.

October was cool and pretty, their walks on campus accented by scarves and bright colored leaves and pumpkins on doorsteps, and it should have been perfect. Mid-semester, the height of autumn, a friendship they’d been in now for a while, a world cast in gold. But Zuko remained strange around him, a new wall erected between them. Sokka watched him, unsure what had changed, what he'd done. Yet Zuko was still there, still talking, still smiling, except now most of what Sokka saw were the layers of shirts and necklaces, the rings on his hands that he twisted between his fingers, the hair falling across his eyes.

They were down in the library again, notes spread across the table, when Sokka finally asked if he was ok.

Zuko looked at him in surprise. 

"Yeah, of course," he said, but then his eyes were gone again. 

"You sure?" Sokka pressed, testing the weight of the bridge between them.

Zuko looked at him again, almost like he was deliberating something, but Sokka didn't know what he was looking for. Whatever Zuko found in Sokka’s face, he did eventually turn and open his messenger bag, offering a "Um, I just…" before pulling something free.

And then there was the volume, Sokka's sketched up little heart expressed by someone else, held out in one of Zuko's hands. But there was still something even more odd and guarded in his expression. Sokka took the book back, careful like it could break being passed hand to hand. 

"Did you read it?" Sokka asked, a little embarrassed by the eagerness coming into his voice.

"Um, yeah," Zuko said, fiddling with his pencil and not quite looking at him. "Yeah, I did."

Sokka waited a moment and then, when Zuko remained silent, prompted "And?"

"And what?" Zuko asked, meeting his eyes again. 

Sokka didn't understand what was happening or what his expression meant or why Zuko was acting like Sokka wanted him to disarm a bomb. He thought he'd gotten better at reading him. Zuko bit his nails when he was thinking hard. The skin above his nose furrowed when he was genuinely irritated. He touched the tip of his tongue to the middle of his upper lip when he was invested in something Sokka had to say. But this face?

This was… something else. Someone else.

"Well, what did you think of it?" Sokka asked, watching him because it was still  _ Zuko.  _ There was no way he didn't have some comment about a collection of poetry.

Zuko cleared his throat. "Um, yeah, it was… fine."

Fine. 

That word, for some reason, was like someone had punched Sokka right in the diaphragm.

It must have shown in his face, because Zuko added quickly, "Good, honestly. Interesting."

Sokka continued to stare at him. He'd heard Zuko go off for fifteen full minutes about Ezra Pound's two line "In a Station of the Metro" literally a day ago, but now with an entire collection at his disposal, he came up with three empty words? 

Oh god, he'd hated it hadn't he? 

Why did that feel so strangely personal?

"I actually," Zuko ventured again, hesitant and nervous and unfamiliar, "really liked your commentary--your notes and stuff, the lines you underlined. Your ideas, responses, that was…" he swallowed, looking pained, "cool to read."

'Cool to read'? Sokka could have laughed if he didn't feel so unfathomably stupid, and Zuko's embarrassed expression didn't help. If Zuko hated it that much, how dumb did he think Sokka was for loving it? Had he been sitting there the whole time suddenly questioning Sokka's taste? Just quietly shaking his head and mentally mocking all those words and lines Sokka had connected to, had poured over because they spoke to him, understood something about him that he hadn't seen for himself? Sokka tucked the book up to his chest without realizing it, pressing it flat with his forearms so he could feel it against his sternum. Zuko watched him do this, something wounded in his expression again. 

"So it wasn't to your taste," Sokka said finally, and it definitely came out defensive. "That's fine. You gave it a shot."

"Oh, no, that's not--" Zuko began, "I wasn't trying to say I didn't  _ like _ it--"

"It's fine," Sokka repeated shortly, cutting him off. "It's not for everyone. It's not a big deal."

Zuko chewed his lower lip. "Ok, but I didn't mean--the poems, they're, um, well…" But he trailed away, just more empty air between them.

"Maybe it's just personal to me," Sokka continued, pushing past Zuko's nothing sentences, "and that's fine. Art is subjective and the Blue Spirit--maybe it was just when I read this book for the first time that made his stuff mean so much to me." He tried to keep his tone reasonable. "You don't have to enjoy all the same stuff I enjoy--your wrong opinions about James Joyce are proof enough of that--and yeah, maybe the Blue Spirit's stuff is a little prose-y and dramatic for some readers, and I get that, so it's ok if it’s not for you."

Zuko was still staring at him, leaning forward a little, expression trapped like he was about to speak even though it was hurting him, his forehead furrowed. 

"Sokka, look, I…" he stared softly, and his expression had gone apologetic, maybe a little guilty, and that wasn't what Sokka wanted either. 

It was just poetry. He shouldn't take it personally. 

"Zuko, really, it's fine," he said, letting out a breath and managing an approximation of a smile. "Let's drop it, ok? It's probably just good I've got the book back so I can check some page numbers."

He didn't wait for an answer before turning back to his laptop and setting  _ Banished and Burning _ down next to it. He kept his eyes focused on the essay in front of him, the document he had pulled up, and gave much more attention and care to checking the page numbers of his in-text citations than he really needed to. But it was better than looking at Zuko, wondering if he was still watching him, if he'd gone back to his own work too. Sokka splayed his hand over the book pages, holding them open and looking down again at his familiar musings. He added an extra quote to paragraph four of his essay and looked at his little scribbly notes in the margins again, this time with a more critical eye. Had Zuko just shook his head and laughed at Sokka's little snippets next to a line about slowly healing scars -  _ did he lose someone too? was it like Yue? does the scar ever really heal?  _ He must have thought Sokka was such a stupid sap. But Sokka focused on identifying line breaks and not looking at Zuko. 

When he next checked his phone, he only had a half hour before class, so he began the process of packing up to go. As much as he wasn't enjoying this Chem class, the midterm exam was soon and Sokka needed this review day. He grumbled as he repositioned to get his massive Chemistry textbook situated on top of everything else and then zipped his bag. Even though Zuko didn't have a class yet and typically stayed and kept working when they did stuff like this, he was packing too. They stood up together, and Sokka slung his backpack over his shoulder. Zuko was watching him with something still sort of guilty in his eyes, so Sokka smiled.

"You willing to quiz me over chem terms sometime soon?" he asked. "Although there may need to be some sort of treat for getting stuff right, because I'm definitely at a dog-level of reward system here if I actually wanna make my brain remember words like 'alkyne' and 'titration'."

Then Zuko actually smiled, a little more like himself again, something easing across the top of his shoulders.

"I could do that," he answered. "Are we talking food rewards or sexy rewards?"

Sokka laughed. "Gonna talk dirty to me about covalent bonds?"

"Maybe I will," Zuko said and circled around the table. 

He glanced around to be sure they were alone and then grabbed Sokka by the back of the neck and kissed him, hot and open mouthed and  _ aching _ . He tugged Sokka even closer, hip to hip, and Sokka groaned against him and went pliant in his grip, hands moving to curl around his back. God, it was like being enveloped by the sun when Zuko kissed him like this, and Sokka could have lived in this kind of warmth like a plant, only needing Zuko to survive. A truly terrifying thought but there anyway, sprouting in his middle.

After a moment, Zuko drew back and dropped their foreheads together, still holding the back of Sokka's head. 

"We ok?" Zuko whispered, eyes shut.

Sokka melted a little. "We're ok," he replied, maybe just because he wanted to believe it.

He ended up late to Chemistry, but he also couldn't bring himself to care. 

Let Zuko be distant and weird. Let him dislike Sokka's favorite poet. Let him keep being secretive and hard to read. Just so long as he kept being there, kept liking  _ Sokka _ . He could settle for that. 

God, he already  _ had. _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much to everyone giving this very odd literary-nerd story a chance, and I've loved hearing all of your opinions about the language, poetry, and characterization! You're all so thoughtful and amazing, and I hope you know that I value each and every one of you :)


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Through some vulnerable conversation, Zuko and Sokka start to recognize that there's more between them than they'd let themselves believe.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cw: smoking

_ Tell me about a soul adrift.  _

_ No, tell me about a shipwreck, taken back by the ink-blue fingers of the sea to be sung to sleep there. A soul made slippery with algae, preserved in the bitter blanket of salt. Am I waiting to be found? _

_ Salvage the worthwhile parts of me. _

_ Dig through the history, the calcified chains that still secure the unholy pieces. Let the fish gnaw, pick apart the remnants of past traumas and my scarlet-touched insecurities. Let fragments be tossed foam-white upon an unknown shore. _

_ Leave most of me under the pull of the moon, nothing but the old scar of memory. _

\-- the Blue Spirit

Zuko was smoking. 

He shouldn't be and he'd worked to quit, but sometimes he still craved that burn. Sometimes he needed it, could almost picture Jet in the dark, passing one over, knowing he needed the smoke and the calm and the fire. Offering it as the only way he knew how to help: destruction, distraction, disdain. It was how Jet had survived; why couldn't Zuko learn to survive the same way? He'd found it easier and easier with time to accept the offered fire different than the one already inside him.

But now, as he breathed slowly and watched the city hang before him, half-awake, he wasn't concerned with Jet. Just another portion of his life he'd folded tight and stuffed in an envelope, put away next to all the other lost or cut off parts of Zuko's life. It was safer that way, for everyone. 

If only they'd all stay there, apart from the rest of him. 

Tonight was one of those nights where he stood on his rickety, would-be balcony with its metal railings, leaned out toward the city, and inhaled ash against the cold. A night where he needed to burn again. When nothing else would help beat back the shadows, even if it ate away inside him. He'd just worked so damn hard to detangle himself from his family. Fought and struggled and clawed himself free, but they were always still out there, worming their way back into his life.

He'd written once a line about being adrift. Those words felt far away now.

It wasn't his whole family. He had to remember that. Uncle was fine. Uncle loved him and gave him space, but everyone else… but no, that was unfair too. His little half-sister Kiyi was fine too. She liked to send him cards full of drawings and very long letters about all the things she was doing, and Zuko liked getting them and writing back. She was young enough and had grown up far enough from Ozai (his father, not hers, his contamination out of her blood) to keep from getting tainted. She was safe and kind, a little bright spot in the swamp of his family. Because the rest of them… he shook his head and inhaled. 

His dad, still always looming like a shadow, still out there and powerful and waiting, forcing him to change his number, stay offline. His mom, who he remembered as kind but who had left him, created her own happier life and only came back much later, with a new husband, a new child, and hovered now only at the edges of Zuko's life. His other sister, still his father's right-hand and in some ways more frightening for her nearness to his age and how very well she knew him. 

They'd found his number again and called, Azula's message sneering and cajoling about his duty and his home, his father's cold and hard and layered with things that weren't quite threats to the casual listeners but still were at their core. He knew them immediately, felt their words, the tone of their voices, like drumbeats in his blood. Or maybe that was just the way his heart pounded, the anger and fear that choked him and pulled him backwards. No matter how long it had been, when they found his number, it was the same jerk of a leash on his throat. It was the same things through the voicemails and the texts, the same words said in different ways: Come back, Zuko. Come be part of the family. You owe us for raising you. You owe us for sharing our blood. You owe us because you're still alive. We miss our easy competition, our scapegoat, our punching bag. Come home, come home, come home, our little Zuko...

He took a shaky breath. They didn't know where he was, and they couldn't actually get to him, even if they'd found his number again. They still couldn't find him, and Uncle wouldn't tell them anything even if they dared to ask him. Neither would Kiyi, or his mom, whatever oddness in their relationship. He had to trust that, to trust  _ something _ . For once, there was power against his family to keep him apart from them. They couldn't have him anymore. They could only circle at the edges of the restraining order, poking for weakness, but they couldn't actually get through. Zuko had called the cops on them before and he'd do it again if he had to. But he wasn't changing his damn number, not this time.

Sokka had this number.

But even knowing all this, turning the logic over in his head, didn't assuage the fear. It didn't change the crippling cold that went through him at his father's voice coming from a blocked number, his sister's words glowing out of the screen. And so he needed a cigarette again, just one, slowly and to savor the inhale and the taste and the bit of fire at the corner of his vision. It would even him out a little, enough that he could work on assignments or try to write more or do something normal with himself. He could be a person, touched by the fire but not consumed by it.

His phone rang and made him jump, but he answered it without thinking. 

Thank any god that was listening that it was Sokka and not the people it could have been.

"Can I come over?" said Sokka's voice immediately. "I just need to go somewhere else, and I need to--I'd like to see you, if you're not busy or whatever."

Zuko paused briefly, although it wasn't really a hesitation.

"Of course you can come over," he said softly and gave him the address. 

He could hear Sokka's breath through the phone, could somehow picture his face, the downward pull of his eyebrows and the heaviness of his lashes against his cheekbones, the shadows cast along the underside of his lips and beneath his jaw.

"It's tiny and messy, but as long as you're cool with that--" Zuko explained. 

"Will you be there?"

"Yes? What--"

"Then I'm cool with it," Sokka said immediately. "I'll be there soon."

Zuko stared at his phone a moment after Sokka hung up and then tucked it back in his pocket. Sokka could have his address. Sokka could be trusted. Sokka was separate from all of it, a glow in the shadowy darkness, and Zuko sometimes got to step into that light, bask in it for a moment when he was allowed. Sokka wouldn't get hurt by any of this because he was outside of it, untouchable in his remoteness. Zuko had kept him safe, protected them both with his distance, so for just this moment, Sokka could come a little closer. He could let him. Zuko's family couldn't get to him and neither could Zuko's stupid, traitorous heart. He didn't have to worry that he'd somehow sully him with his unworthy hands. 

Hmm. He was all poetry tonight, apparently, the words and images dragged back out of him from somewhere buried. He took another slow inhale and looked back out at the city, the scattering of lights and buildings and streets and sky, all blurring together. It should have felt smothering, the nearness of so many buildings, so many other people, so many lives. But it didn’t. It felt a bit like being hidden, another mask like the Blue Spirit that made him nameless, turned him abstract.

He took another breath and let it out into the disinterested sky.

He wondered briefly where Sokka was coming from, what would bring him here. Issues with his sister? Problem at school? Did he work a job or have some team or organization he might be leaving? Zuko didn't know for sure. Those straightforward facts were still unanswered. Instead, he knew that Sokka had a strange resonance with Sappho, which he felt read more modern than it had any right to, and that he typically hated rhyme schemes and loved reading poetry aloud because it hit different when it was spoken, when you could hear the emotion. He argued using logic and laughed easily and knew considerably more than be ever let on. Zuko knew how his mouth moved and that he liked hands in his hair and that he tended to swear when he came and then kiss or bite down on whatever body part was closest-- Zuko's neck, his shoulder, his lips. He knew the way Sokka's voice made his skin shiver and the way his eyes dipped in and out of his dreams. And because of the poetry book, he knew what Sokka felt when the layers were peeled back: the longing, the loss, the insecurity, the ache of love.

Zuko knew all that stuff but not the basics. Somehow they'd done this all out of order.

Sokka buzzed at the front entrance and Zuko stubbed off his cigarette and let him up. Too quickly, Sokka was at his front door, crossing the threshold from Zuko's outer life to his private one. Zuko let him into the somewhat cramped and dark space, his sacred little home, with its wheezing radiator and fridge that sometimes groaned in the middle of the night and the people across the hall who occasionally played loud rave music at 4am. But for now, it was quiet and dark and so was Sokka, his expression clouded. 

"I've never been to your place before," he noted, eyes finally looking to Zuko's, half-questioning, half-flat.

"Yeah, I… don't really have people over," he said, for lack of any more eloquent explanation.

Sokka's expression was careful again, bordered on sad. "I'm sorry if I… imposed," he said, "asking to come here."

"You didn't. You couldn't," Zuko said, words past his lips before he thought, considered, wondered at what they meant. "It's you."

Sokka stared at him for a long moment where that statement hung between them, and then he bent down and began to take off his shoes. He kicked them off then and straightened, the tension coming visibly back into his body again.

"You ok?" Zuko asked finally, thinking about Sokka's voice on the phone, the face he'd conjured in his mind.

Sokka looked around and then found the tiny loveseat Zuko had rescued from a dumpster to make a kind of living room in his cluttered space. He'd chosen it over a dining room table, so it awkwardly sat between the kitchen and the main space of his bedroom next to his biggest bookshelf. And now it contained Sokka, flopped backwards into it like he was too heavy for his body.

"I'm a failure," Sokka said abruptly. "And I don't know what I'm doing with my life."

Zuko shifted his weight, wondering if he should try to cram in beside him on the couch, should offer something, should reach for comfort or support.

"What happened?" he asked instead of doing any of those things, and Sokka let out a long and heavy sigh.

"I'm failing Chemistry," he said and then was off. "Bombed the last test and now I'm failing, and I'm skimming by with a D in Thermodynamics, and I can't afford to retake these classes and throw off my entire schedule. I don't have that kind of money, but so much of it doesn't make sense to me and it  _ should _ if I wanna do this." His expression was vivid with frustration even in the dim lighting, the motion of his hands as sharp as his words. "But maybe I'm on the wrong path! Maybe I  _ can't  _ do this! Maybe I don't  _ want  _ to!" He dug his hands into his hair. "Maybe I've wasted all this time and money just to end up being an office temp in Arts and Sciences forever. All Sokka Amaruq is good for, apparently: fetching coffee, scanning documents, filling out spreadsheets. What a future. What every kid dreams of--growing up to be someone else's secretary!”

Zuko wet his lips, wondering if he should speak, but Sokka continued on without him. Zuko understood and let him talk.

“Maybe that's the best I can hope for! Maybe that's all I deserve!” Sokka announced brokenly. “If I was better--smarter, more disciplined, something!--then I wouldn’t be struggling!" He dragged his hands down his face. "Maybe I aimed too high. Maybe I’m just being an idiot. Because I can't do these classes and I don't know what I  _ want _ ."

Zuko watched him through this entire tirade, the hand motions and wild facial expressions and clear and overwhelming anger and despair, and didn't know what to do. He didn't know what to say except that he wished he could hold Sokka's face in his hand, press kisses to his closed eyelids until Sokka trusted himself again. He wished he had the words for something like this, some reassurance, something of value, some way of articulating how brilliant and strong and good Zuko thought he was.

"You want a cigarette?" Zuko offered instead of anything reasonable.

Sokka, who had lapsed into a tense and tired silence, eyed him in surprise. 

"Yeah, actually," he responded after a moment, and Zuko jerked his head back toward the shitty balcony.

Once outside, Zuko passed him one, which Sokka held to his lips while Zuko lit it. It flares to life, illuminating the planes of his face, and then he let out a slow breath and a steady cloud of smoke.

"Didn't know you were a smoker," Sokka commented, taking another shallow drag.

"Didn't know you were either," Zuko offered, lighting his own. Two was fine. He deserved it. He'd stop then. 

"I'm not," Sokka said, leaning his forearm on the railing and shaking the ash down into the street far below. 

"Yeah, me either," Zuko replied, moving to stand beside him and similarly lean, "yet here we are."

"Here we are," Sokka echoed, breathing in again. Zuko tracked the way his chest expanded, the way it contracted again and the smoke slid from between his parted lips.

"My ex was the smoker," Zuko supplied, because the world was strange and far away and Sokka was here, "and it's the only thing I still hang on to from him, even though I try not to."

Sokka let out another breath, rougher this time. "Thought you didn't do relationships." He sounded tired, distant, sore like an old bone break.

"I don't." Zuko met his eyes for a moment. "Not anymore."

"Ah," Sokka said, nodding and taking another drag. He leaned further onto the rail. "Do you still miss him?"

And Zuko actually considered that, tried to imagine Jet in Sokka's place, beside him in the uneven night, what that would feel like.

"No," he replied honestly. "We were too similar in all the worst ways, and I loved him but..." He shook his head, remembering the secrets and the fighting and the clashing, echoing personalities. "Then one day he was gone and that was it. And I don’t… I can’t blame him, really. He wasn’t wrong to leave." He huffed a breath of smoke up into the air and watched it dissipate, fading more and more into blackness. "Doesn't mean it didn't hurt though."

Sokka's eyes were on him again. 

"I'm sorry," he said quietly. "I'm sorry he did that. You…" He looked up at the sky, overcast and inscrutable. "You deserve better."

Zuko watched him for a moment, the lines of his profile, the lean of his body, not sure he believed him but appreciating the sentiment regardless.

"I'm sorry you're dealing with the shit you're dealing with too," Zuko said. "That's… well, it fucking sucks, struggling and feeling like that."

Sokka gave a small sort of laugh and put the cigarette to his lips again. 

"Yeah, well, it's my own fault," he replied. "Don't know that I even  _ want  _ to be an engineer, but I was so into science and inventing and taking shit apart as a kid that when my dad suggested it and got so excited for me, I just went with it." He took another inhale, the soft curl of his lips drawing Zuko's eye. "He was so proud of me, making something for myself, going into a career field where I'd make money and do something useful. And here I am…" he exhaled a heavy puff of smoke, "second guessing and fucking it all up." 

He looked down at the cigarette in his hand and rolled it a little between his fingers.

"I'm sorry," Zuko said again, because he didn't know what else to say. This wasn't about suggesting tutoring services or going to a career center for guidance. He knew that. It was something deeper. He just didn't know how to address what that something deeper was, the insecurities Sokka was baring, what he needed from Zuko.

"I wish," he tried instead, "that you weren't dealing with it, that sort of identity crisis. Because you're… well, I think you could do anything--be good at anything you wanted. Because you're, um… great."

Sokka offered him a raised eyebrow and the crooked bit of a smile, which Zuko deserved for being a rambling idiot. What was happening to him tonight? What had happened to all his resolve, all his distance?

The poetry book. His family. Sokka crossing the threshold into this part of his life.

Everything before this felt like another existence. He didn't care anymore.

"But I hope you know I'm… here," Zuko finished. "If I can do anything to help. Dealing with it all. Whatever that looks like. You know?"

Still terrible, and yet Sokka shot him a grateful sort of smile. Like maybe he got the sentiment anyway.

"Thank you," he said, very much like he meant it, and it made something curl over itself in Zuko's middle.

"You're welcome," he replied and quickly took another inhale before he said anything else stupid.

"Whatever happens in the future," Sokka offered after a moment, "thanks for letting me come hide out here tonight to be dramatic and existential."

"That should basically be the sign on my door," Zuko said with a slim smile of his own, which Sokka returned.

"Well, it's what I needed, and I just… trust you, to be around. Understand." He tongued his lower lip, looking up at the sky again, which showed off the sculpture of his throat. "I just knew if I went home, Katara would know something was wrong and then she'd immediately go off about talking to my instructors and making a weekly study schedule and being a better student and on and on and…" He sighed. "I just couldn't deal with it right now, and I knew you wouldn't do that, that you'd get it. These damn feelings. I just… know you." He shook his head. "Sorry if that's weird."

Zuko gave a dry sort of laugh and looked at the city again. 

"It's not. You do know me," he replied. "Why do you think I'm smoking tonight? This isn't something I do when I'm feeling chipper and well adjusted."

Sokka hummed in acknowledgement and then rotated to face him, leaning his hip into the railing. The sooty darkness out here fit him somehow, just being hit with the distant glow of the light on above the sink in the kitchen coming through the patio doors, the rest of him swathed in shadow and grey.

"So what's got you not so chipper and not so well adjusted?" he asked, putting the cigarette to that mouth again, the fire on it flaring as he breathed and scattering sparks of light into the blue of his eyes. "Is it the ex?"

"Nah," Zuko said with a head shake, "haven't heard from him in a year. The smoking's just a shitty coping method he taught me that I can't quite kick."

Sokka nodded. "We all gotta cope somehow." He looked at him again. "So if not that, then what's got you out here?"

Zuko looked away from him, back out into the dark and chill of November. "Just family stuff," he said with another slow drag. "Just… the past likes to come creeping back into my life again and fuck me up."

"I'm sorry," Sokka said, voice hushed, and Zuko nodded. 

"They're… bad people, my family," he explained, unsure how he could articulate it, the things he'd buried and fled from, the things he didn't say, if he should even say them now. Then he was speaking anyway. "Well, most of them. Not my uncle or my little half sister. Not really my mom either, but she also left us with  _ him _ and knew how he was and never came back, so those old, nice memories only carry so much weight." 

He could feel Sokka watching him, the intensity of that gaze, but he didn't look at it. He didn't know why he kept talking except that he felt Sokka's presence there like the security of the light behind a familiar window. He swallowed and spoke.

"I've still got the restraining order to keep them away, after everything. But they try to get around it, try to get to me again," he said, voice cold and mocking as he mimicked their voices. "I should be with family. I should be with the company. I should be a good boy and stop being some pathetic, artsy queer and come back to bowing and scraping in front of the man who decided an acceptable childhood punishment was to hold my face in a fire." He took another heavy inhale, the smoke biting at the back of his throat. "Flames on my fucking face and I'm just a screaming kid and he didn’t--he doesn’t care. Because in his mind, I deserved it." He swallowed hard. 

"Zuko…" Sokka murmured, voice far away.

Zuko raised his head but couldn't see past the story being pulled out of him.

"Even that wasn't enough," he murmured, taking another quick inhale of smoke. "I still wasn't good enough, and now I was a  _ symbol _ , something that could make him look bad. The cops, CPS, they were circling. So he kicked me out."

He heard Sokka's breath beside him, raspy and hard, but he couldn't look at him. He was far away, back in it, that fear and rage eating at his gut, through his lungs.

"He kicks  _ me _ out as a kid and I make my own damn way and find my uncle and create a  _ life _ , a life that's  _ mine _ . And now that I have, how dare I keep him at arm's length? How dare I use the law to keep them back?" The words tasted like salt in his mouth. "How  _ dare _ I not want to come crawling back to my father and my sister and my shitty old life?" 

He finally stopped, realizing how much he was sharing. He didn't tell people this shit because this was what scared people off, led to keys left on counters and only having bad habits to remember someone by. He heaved a breath and looked over at Sokka again. The other man was watching him with a sort of horrified look, his expression washed in shadow. There were only the points of brightness in the centers of his eyes.

"God, Zuko…" he muttered.

"I'm sorry," Zuko said, reflexively.

Sokka's eyebrows pulled together. "Why are you  _ sorry _ ?"

"For telling you--dumping this on you," Zuko said, "when we're not--when we're just whatever we are--"

"Labels or not," Sokka said, almost shortly, "I'm a  _ human being _ and your  _ friend _ , and god's sake, Zuko, you realize I care about you, right?"

Zuko met his eyes again, more longing than he knew how to carry. 

"Are you safe here?" Sokka asked, face going serious. "Could they actually come and hurt you?"

Zuko shook his head, but Sokka went on anyway.

"Really, Zuko. Do you need somewhere else to stay? Because there's an extra room in the rental house and I know Katara would be fine with it too, and we could get more locks on the doors and--"

Zuko shook his head again, allowing himself a smile. "I'm safe here," he said. "They just found my phone number again, but that's…" He shrugged and put the cigarette to his lips again before going on. "No one dangerous knows my address. Just Uncle and Mom and Kiyi, and weird relationship or not, I trust them not to say anything. Well, and you, now," he added like an afterthought and met his eyes again, "and I trust you too."

But it wasn't an afterthought. It was a confession, a sacrament.

"Good," Sokka muttered, eyes bright, "but still. If you're ever not safe, will you come stay with me?" He reached out and touched just the back of Zuko's wrist, a warm fingertip against the cool night air. "Please. Promise me you'll come and be safe."

Zuko's chest was squeezing a bit too tight at the look in Sokka's eyes.

"Ok," he replied, "I promise if I'm not safe here, I'll… come to you."

It felt far too big for the unlabeled nothing they'd been doing, too serious an offer and too quick an acceptance. But if Zuko's statement had been a confession, Sokka's felt like a covenant. 

Zuko didn't know what it meant, but he couldn't find it in him to be afraid of it anymore. It wasn't as though the label hadn't been there tugging at the edges all along while Zuko tried to resist it, while he tried to pretend it wasn't. It existed between them, as clear as that fingertip against his skin.

Sokka, unaware of these thoughts, just nodded and shook the ash off his cigarette. "God, if I was dealing with the shit you're dealing with, I wouldn't be the occasional smoker. I'd probably be locked in an institution." He rested his elbow on the railing. "So it seems like you're doing pretty good considering. Making and having your own life."

Zuko managed a smile. "Well I'm glad you think so, because I… don’t, a lot of the time." 

Sokka took another slow breath and then let the smoke out from between his parted lips, but his eyes were still on Zuko, cautious and kind. “That’s why you don’t talk about your family at all? The restraining order and the… trauma?” He winced a little as his choice of words, but Zuko didn't mind. It's not like he was wrong.

“That’s why I don’t talk about my family,” Zuko agreed. “That’s part of why I keep so many things secret.” He looked aside at him for a moment. “Not because of you. Not because I want to.”

“No, I get it. I’d be secretive too with a family like that,” Sokka said, and somehow, that was strangely reassuring.

Being known. Being understood. 

"Thanks for letting me in, though," Sokka added, almost a whisper, and it lay there between them, the symbol of that opened door, the unsaid words.

Zuko took a step just slightly closer to him, so that if they moved just right, their arms would brush. Sokka glanced at him with a small smile and moved so their hands touched on the railing, just little finger to little finger.

They stood a while in silence, and even that, in an odd way, felt safer and better than hiding alone, just Sokka’s presence, the movement of his breath, the faint scent coming off his clothes.

When it had burned too low, Zuko moved to squashed out the end of his cigarette in the little ashtray on the ground and then stood again. 

"You alright?" Sokka asked, that genuine concern again, the transparency that always shook Zuko a little.

"Yeah. Enough." Zuko looked aside at him. "You?"

"Yeah. Enough," Sokka echoed.

They watched each other, still too close together.

"So now what?" Zuko asked, swallowed as they were in darkness and night.

Sokka followed his lead and stubbed his own cigarette out and left it too, straightening to face him again. "What do you mean?"

Zuko felt the crackle of something in the air, the kind of dizziness you get from teetering on a precipice. 

"What do you want now?" he asked.

Sokka leveled him with a gaze, still so blue even in the darkness, his eyes fringed with shadow.

"You, Zuko," he said softly, "I want  _ you  _ like I'll break apart if I don't touch you soon."

Zuko felt that like a twist in his stomach.

"Then touch me," he replied. "Come and touch me."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is all the background I really give on Zuko's family history so I hope it makes sense! I wanted to leave it somewhat open ended because the particulars don't really matter here as much as Zuko's response to them, but you can infer whatever details you'd like about what and how this all happened, and I'd be more than happy to hear your thoughts and headcanons!
> 
> Also a quick update on posting in case you don't also read my Midwest Zukka:
> 
> This story is fully written and just being constantly revised, so I will keep steadily updating this story even as I plan to post/update other stories as well.
> 
> Thanks so much anyone reading or giving kudos or commenting or talking to me about my deep-dive into lit nerd story. You all are the best.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They're clearly not just friends with benefits. But what they actually are remains unspoken.

_ You do not have to be good. _

_ You do not have to walk on your knees _

_ for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. _

_ You only have to let the soft animal of your body _

_ love what it loves. _

_ Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. _

_ Meanwhile the world goes on. _

\-- Mary Oliver

Sokka had given up on thinking it through. There was just his own fear and Zuko's pain and their bodies and the empty night. He tossed his shirt off over his head as soon as they were back inside, unsure where it ended up, and Zuko's was gone soon after. Only as he touched him, hands splayed across either side of his ribs, did he realize how brittle Zuko sometimes felt. How fragile. How tightly held together.

Sokka kissed him and tasted smoke. There was probably some sort of metaphor there, them both breathing ash into the other's mouth as they kissed, but if there was, he couldn't name it now. He still wasn't thinking. He was digging the tips of his fingers into Zuko's skin like that could help keep him together, like Sokka could somehow press some of his own resilience into Zuko's cells. Which didn't make sense, especially considering he didn't have much resilience left himself. He was lost in the dark at this point, stumbling blindly forward because that was the way he'd begun, unsure where he was even still going. God, he hated it, but Zuko, Zuko was out in front for now, a place to plant his hands.

Sokka slid his tongue into Zuko's mouth and didn't care about the rest of it. He ran his hands up his bare back, the slim line of him, the sharp angles of his shoulder blades, and kissed deeper. Zuko made a gasping noise, something pulled from between his lips, and that erased anything else for a little while longer. Then they were at the bed and falling in together, and everything was different. They'd never done this here before, against his blanket, with these apartment sounds, with this scent of skin and soap and rust and paper. Sokka had never been let in here before, never been let in at all, not like this.

He held Zuko down and graced his teeth along the line of his jaw, tasting him, feeling him,  _ knowing _ him. Everything was warm and familiar and unfamiliar at once, but Zuko still tasted the same, even smudged as he was with smoke. Zuko moved to reclaim his mouth for himself and brought his hands up to dig into Sokka's hair, slide out the tie and gather up the loose strands into a fist. The slight pull prickled at Sokka's scalp, sent a sort of shiver down his neck, and he realized he was panting into the kiss, all breath and spit. 

Had he ever wanted anyone quite like this before? With something that seemed to come right from the center of his bones, like it had been lodged there, just waiting for the right moment to emerge? If he had, he certainly couldn't remember right now, couldn't see outside the present moment.

"Fuck, I want you so bad, want you like I'll fuckin' die if I can't have you, can't touch you," he murmured, nipping at the shell of Zuko's ear and pressing their bodies closer together. "Can't explain it, can't understand it, just you in my hands…"

He wasn't sure what he was even saying. It was just spilling out, harsh and low, because of the way Zuko's hands were on him, the way their hips fit together, the way the night had peeled them open and left them raw. Zuko's breath back in his ear was a kind of gasp, a kind of plea.

"Please," he breathed. "Tell me, Sokka. Tell me."

Sokka pressed a kiss just under his ear, heart loud in his chest.

"Wanna feel you and hear you," he murmured as he continued running kisses down his neck, "because you're so fucking beautiful and you do something to me. You don't even realize it." His mouth worked over Zuko's collarbone, and the other man gasped again, tightened his grip, squeezed shut his eyes. "Every time you open your mouth, I want it on me. Every time you show even a little skin I wanna taste it, bite it, have it for myself. Wanna lick every goddamn notch in your spine on the way down and make you beg for me to touch you more..." 

He was babbling wild, guttural nonsense, but Zuko was responding, and his body was there, and all the other shit could wait a little while longer, right? All those things they hadn't named could be ignored.

He kissed his way over his chest, hands stroking that soft, light skin that shivered at his touch. 

"Zuko…" Sokka murmured against his ribs. "God, I could keep touching you forever, do you know that?" A response that was more breath than word. "I could stay here, could be content just holding you, having you in my arms, hearing your voice. Would take anything…" He pressed a kiss into the thin skin under his hip bone. "Want all of you--all of it--every fucking part of you I can get, that you'll give me..." 

Zuko's voice was soft and broken and far away, and Sokka moved back up to kiss him, swallow down those sounds.

"What do you want?" Sokka breathed against his mouth. "What do you want from me?"

There was a moment of pause, and then Zuko's eyes opened, heavy and longing and gold, burning their way into Sokka again. Like always. Like something holy.

"I just want  _ you _ ," Zuko whispered. "Just you. Here. With me." 

He reached a hand out, pressed it to the dip of Sokka's low back, slid it up his side. His fingers dug in, nails scraping just barely into his skin, and Sokka held his breath.

"I don't wanna feel anything except you right now," Zuko gasped, eyes shutting again. “You, Sokka, my Sokka.”

Sokka kissed Zuko's cheek, his forehead, his lips.

"I can do that," Sokka murmured. "Anything you want, everything you want. Let me take care of you."

"Yes. Sokka, fuck, I just want you," Zuko breathed like a heavy exhale, and Sokka kissed him one more time and slid back down his body.

Zuko had what they needed, and Sokka tried to take his time, and he would have taken even longer if Zuko hadn't found his eyes again with something desperate in their depth, his hand on his cheek. When they did fit together, bodies locked, legs tangled, Sokka could hardly breathe for the feel of it, of being so close. He needed him. When had that happened? When it had stopped being just a  _ want _ ? Zuko's breath was back in his ear and the warm heat of his body all around him, through him. The motions were small and deep and intimate and breath-stealing, skin to skin. Zuko scrabbled at the sheets for Sokka's hand. Sokka found it (careful, intentional, needing), knit their fingers together, and held.

***

_ Tell me about the concept of home. _

_ I ask only because I hope, one day, that home will only be the space it takes to write your name. _

\-- the Blue Spirit

Zuko still wanted to create poetry, wanted to find a way to explain how Sokka's presence had turned to lightning under his skin, had undone so many months of separation. 

Even finished, Sokka still had his hand locked with Zuko's, and as they came down, he pressed kisses into the side of his neck, into his hairline, purring half-muffled words into his skin. Zuko reached for him with his other hand, looped it around Sokka's torso, curled his fingers around the back of Sokka's neck.

"Should I move?" Sokka whispered. "I'm probably crushing you--"

"Don't go," Zuko murmured, needy, wanting, selfish, "not yet. Just stay a little while longer."

Sokka pressed another kiss just under his ear and stayed where Zuko could breath into the junction of his neck and shoulder.

Sokka still scattered the occasional kisses across his skin, although mostly he just rested his head against Zuko's as they both breathed and steadied again. Zuko was aware of the soft, cool exhale of Sokka's breath over his skin, of the strange and right way their bodies tucked together. Sokka was warm, smooth to the touch, strong and heavy and solid. For a little while, with Sokka’s body above him, he was untouched by anything else. 

It was only when Zuko started moving from "comfortably smothered" to "suffocating just a little", he shifted around and Sokka actually moved off of him.

"Shower," Zuko said, not asking, and grabbed his hand and pulled him along. Sokka didn't resist. 

The water was hot and soothing and sputtered a bit from the old pipes, but they washed up beneath it, quiet and back to being careful with the other. But Zuko wanted more than that, still felt the ghosts of his life outside this apartment, the fear that tried to crawl into his skin. He wanted back that Sokka who was explaining, telling, answering questions he didn't even realize he'd been asking. He couldn't quite let that go just yet. So he hoped his eyes asked for enough permission as he pulled Sokka into his arms under the spray and hung on. It was warm and strangely safe, locked there in the water, in a steamy bubble away from the rest of the world, all white linoleum and closed walls and the clatter of the shower curtain rings. And Sokka stayed and held him, skin slippery and clean, his loosened hair dripping water down his face and onto Zuko as he tucked his own face against the other man's neck. He smelled like soap and sun and some earthy scent that was innate to Sokka and couldn't be covered completely. Something that made Zuko think of libraries and comfort and lungs that weren't full of fire. 

The water tried its best to wash away the smell of burning on them both. Zuko could tell, even though it lingered. He imagined that was mostly just from his own mouth.

Zuko dug his hands into Sokka's back and pressed his face further into his shoulder. If he shut his eyes, there was just Sokka again, and that was a gift. Still he wished he could somehow be even closer, could curl up in his arms, could live between the gaps in his ribs.

What a weird thing to think, and yet he didn't let go, and Sokka in turn tightened his hold around his shoulders too, pulling them closer together.

"I got you," Sokka murmured into his ear, barely audible over the water.

"You too," Zuko replied, because he was, and he would be, and they were in it together now, however this had occurred. 

"Can I stay here tonight?" Sokka asked, still not moving. 

"Yes," Zuko said immediately. They hadn't ever stayed the night before, the sex always intermixed with other activities, with going home after. "Please stay."

They crawled into bed naked because Zuko didn't want to track down clothes and Sokka made no move to retrieve his own from around the room. So then it was just new sheets thrown on the bed and damp skin, just unsure bodies in that in-between that was intimacy but wasn't sex. Yet in the dark, the rumble and whine of the old building, it felt safe as well. Sokka reached out and touched Zuko's shoulder, shifting a little closer. Zuko felt for his hand in the dark. There was only a bit of light coming in from the windows, but it was enough for Zuko to find and trace the tattoo on Sokka's ribs, the smoothly swooping lines, the nature shapes that blurred together. It was beautiful and fit him somehow, the softness and boldness at once, the gentle references to the ocean calling out to the moon.

"I got it," Sokka offered quietly, "for a girl I loved."

Zuko drew back, meeting his eyes.

"She died when I was fifteen. An autoimmune disease she'd had since she was a baby." His blink and inhale were both slow. "We'd been in love since we were kids," he continued, still watching Zuko, "and then she was gone, and her death hurt like someone had stabbed me in the chest and I couldn't get the knife out. It just had to sit there, hurting, forever.”

Zuko stroked his fingers along the arch of one rib, just under the image drawn into Sokka’s skin. 

“But…" Sokka ran a hand over the tattoo, "this helped some, a different, temporary kind of pain that became a memory, let the other pain ease."

Zuko touched the tattoo again. "It's a beautiful tribute," he said softly, drifting his finger over the curve of the crescent moon. "Sounds like she was lucky to have you."

Sokka's smile was sad. "I hope so," he murmured, "but this is all I've got left of her now, however much we had before."

Zuko ran a hand over his chest and then back to the tattoo, and he gave a thin smile. "Better reminder than still smoking sometimes because of a guy that walked out when it was too hard," he offered. "At least yours is pretty, and permanent, and about love."

Sokka met his eyes, hooded and lush in the dim light. "Yeah well, she didn't want to leave, didn't  _ want  _ me to lose her," he said with a sad smile, "so maybe that's the difference."

Zuko traced another of the lines, the delicate curve of a wave, and thought about the way Sokka cared, how he managed to be so kind, so open, with a loss like that bleeding through him.

" _ The art of losing isn't hard to master _ ," he quoted softly, and Sokka laughed, just a little. 

"Bishop's a liar," he grunted. "It's the hardest fucking thing there is."

"I know," Zuko agreed, stroking over another line, "but at least that girl you loved--she's here, at least a little. Something you can't lose anymore. And..." he added softly, not looking Sokka in the eyes, "she got to be loved by you at all."

Sokka nodded after a moment, as if the words had taken some time to reach him, and his expression went briefly pained again. 

"It's a way to carry that love with me still, I think," he murmured back, "and then the one on my arm," he rotated a little to show him, "is a little more general--my family, my tribe, my history." His smile was wry and small. "I guess I like to keep the things that matter right here on my skin."

Zuko traced those lines too, the way they hugged the muscles in his arm, curled and danced across his skin, more abstract, more powerful. 

"Beautiful," he said again and met Sokka's eyes, hoping he understood. 

He must have, because he smiled a little and bent and kissed him, incredibly soft. 

He grinned a little more as he drew back. "So any fun body modification on you I might have missed?" he teased, clearly trying to move back to lightness, casualness, but it made something clench in Zuko's chest.

Modification. That was a word for it.

"Well, this, I guess," Zuko said, stroking a finger against the edge of the scar on his face, "but that's not one I would have  _ chosen _ so--"

Sokka's face fell. "I'm so sorry. That was super insensitive of me. I shouldn't have--"

"No, you're ok," Zuko replied. "I know what you were saying, but this…" He gestured vaguely. "It's part of my face now. It's just… how it is."

"How…" Sokka asked carefully, "how old were you?"

There was a moment where the old building settled around them and Zuko considered the boundaries of the thing they'd been doing, what was too much of a burden to place in Sokka's open hands.

"You don't have to tell me," Sokka murmured, as if reading his mind. 

"I was thirteen," Zuko replied, "and I want to."

He hated remembering, hated how he could still feel it and smell it if he let himself, but Sokka… his presence was immutable, cut backwards through the memory and made it safe to look at again. He was apart from it completely, and Zuko felt his skin under his hand, the way his chest expanded, and that was real, present, here.

"God, I'm…" Sokka breathed, "that's… I'm so sorry." He reached for his cheek very carefully, fingers slow. "Can I?" he asked, voice fragile. 

"If you want to," Zuko replied, but he tensed anyway as Sokka's fingers reached forward to stroke the roughened skin, the burn lines, the memory.

"Does it still hurt?" he whispered, touching with incredible softness, and Zuko remembered why he so loved those hands. Those hands wouldn't hurt him, even dragging under his eye, over his cheek.

"No," he replied. "I actually don't feel much of anything there anymore." Some of the nerves had been killed, burned away with any finite belief in 'safety' that he'd had at the time, the kind he was still fighting to get back now.

"I'm sorry," Sokka said again, and then shook his head. "That's such a bullshit nothing thing to say but…"

"But what else is there to say to something like that?" Zuko said, still just barely feeling the movement of those fingers, like Sokka was touching him through heavy fabric, from far away.

Sokka's eyes were so sad, tracking the movement of his fingers over the scar, and Zuko almost wanted to stop him, stop the pitying and the awkwardness and the revulsion that might come. But he didn't, just let Sokka investigate and touch and lay there close to him in the dark. An odd, fragile sort of trust that Zuko didn’t entirely understand. Then Sokka’s hand slipped down to cup Zuko's jaw. Gently, so Zuko could pull away if he wanted, Sokka raised his face and brought their lips together.

"You truly are beautiful," Sokka murmured, and from anyone else, Zuko would have thought it was a lie, placating and wrong. But Sokka said things with such honesty, such unwavering conviction, that Zuko let himself sink into it. 

"Thank you," he whispered, "but not like you are." He brushed his lips against Sokka's cheeks and nose, nestling close because for now, in this moment, he  _ could _ , could rub himself against the strange magic of this other man. "I'm some little candle flame and you're a whole ocean, breathtaking and incredible and unchartable."

Sokka drew back and stared at him. 

"Wow," he said finally. "Maybe you should be a poet yourself."

And Zuko couldn't help the small, sad laugh that came out of him at that. 

"Yeah, maybe I should," he muttered, because he couldn't tell him, not now, not like this, "but for now… would you, maybe, read something? To me? Something you love that isn't--" He flung a hand out at the room, hoping it conveyed the whole world beyond this bed. "If you don't mind."

Sokka smiled and gave him one more kiss. "I don't mind. I'd love to read to you," he said before drawing back to track down his phone, which meant untangling from the bed for a moment, a blur of beauty in the dim light. 

But he was back a moment later and tucking back in under the blanket. Zuko had moved over and now he stayed on his own side, in his own space, until Sokka caught and tugged on his arm, pulling him back into his chest. Zuko let himself be pulled, settled against him again. He could hear Sokka's heartbeat through his ribs, feel his chest expand and contract as he breathed. My god, it was perfect, the arm around him, the hand cradling his shoulder. 

"So obviously the Blue Spirit is my favorite," Sokka said, which caused Zuko a moment of concern, but he followed it up by saying, "but I've been digging into his stuff a lot and tonight I'm thinking of someone else. Ever heard of Terrance Hayes?"

Zuko nodded, smiling. "He's got some amazing stuff. I haven't read a lot, though."

"Well," Sokka said, sliding his thumb over his phone screen, "here's one of my favorites--'Lighthead's Guide to the Galaxy'. Sound good?" 

“Sounds perfect,” Zuko whispered.

Sokka shifted, stroked back Zuko's hair, and cleared his throat. His voice was low and warm as he began to read: " _ Ladies and gentlemen, ghosts and children of the state, I am here because I could never get the hang of Time. _ "

His voice rumbled through his chest so that Zuko felt it and heard it at once, the words around and through him. And Sokka's voice was perfect, precise but emotive, fluid but thoughtful. Zuko could drown in that too, right along with his eyes.

"... _Lovemaking mimics the act of departure, moonlight drips from the leaves,_ " Sokka read. " _You can spend your whole life doing no more than preparing for life and thinking 'Is this all there is?'_ "

Zuko ran a hand over Sokka's bare chest, flattened his palm against his sternum, feeling the words there too, through his skin and the nerves of his fingers. 

“... _ Not what you see but what you perceive: that’s poetry, _ ” Sokka read. “ _ Not the noise but it’s rhythm; an arrangement of derangement; I’ll eat you to live: that’s poetry _ .”

Hayes in Sokka’s voice was right. Poetry was the very room they occupied, was the hand rubbing softly against Zuko’s arm and the supple way Sokka breathed the vowels and the way his lips moved over the consonants. 

"... _ When I kiss my wife, sometimes I taste her caution. But let's not talk about that _ ," Sokka continued, filling the apartment with his voice without raising it at all, just by being. " _ Maybe Art's only purpose is to preserve the Self. _ "

Zuko let out a breath and let his eyes shut, let himself be wrapped in it, half aware of the words and half only aware of Sokka, of the cadence and melody of his voice.

"... _ All species have a notion of emptiness, and yet _ ," Sokka read, and bent briefly, surprisingly, to kiss Zuko's forehead, " _ the flowers don't quit opening. _ "

Here, somehow, Zuko couldn't be touched by the pain, couldn't be dragged back to the life he'd been in before. Here, he was someone new.

" _Brothers and sisters, when you spend your nights_ _out on a limb,_ " Sokka concluded, voice soft as Zuko felt the world finally fade, " _there's a chance you'll fall in your sleep._ "

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Terrance Hayes reading "Lighthead's Guide to the Galaxy" if, like Sokka, you wanna hear poetry rather than just read it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsCzw06waIM 
> 
> I really love this chapter for whatever reason, so I hope you enjoyed it too :) Thanks so much all of you for reading, kudos-ing, commenting, or chatting with me in any form. You're all lovely.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The truth comes out...

_ Then there’s the two _

_ of us. This word _

_ is far too short for us, it has only _

_ four letters, too sparse _

_ to fill those deep bare _

_ vacuums between the stars _

_ that press on us with their deafness. _

_ It's not love we don't wish _

_ to fall into, but that fear. _

_ this word is not enough but it will _

_ have to do. It's a single _

_ vowel in this metallic _

_ silence, a mouth that says _

_ O again and again in wonder _

_ and pain, a breath, a finger _

_ grip on a cliffside. You can _

_ hold on or let go. _

\-- Margaret Atwood

Sokka held Zuko in his arms, fully overwhelmed. It was the intimacy of it, the sharing and the clinging together, the safety of this space, the feel of Zuko falling asleep pillowed on his chest while he read. He'd gone so gently, curled up against Sokka's side, face pressed into the space where his shoulder met his pec, and just stayed there while Sokka put his phone carefully aside and watched him sleep. For the first time Sokka could remember, he looked unburdened, soft, young. His hair was loose and a little in his eyes, fluttering down over the uneven shape of the burn scar. As carefully as possible so he wouldn't wake him, Sokka brushed his hair back, looking at the way the edges of the scar licked up into his hairline like tongues of fire themselves, the way it curled around and shrunk his ear. Sokka had noticed it of course--it'd be impossible not to--but he'd assumed some sort of childhood accident like a house fire or a kitchen mishap. Never,  _ never _ had he considered that someone had done it to him intentionally, had meant to cause him that kind of enduring pain. The whole thought seemed impossible, too horrible for reality, if not for the evidence right in front of his face, explained around a low-burning cigarette.

How had something like that happened to him while he'd remained so gentle and kind? How did he keep existing that way, carrying that all the time? It didn't make sense.

Sokka would've become a fucking monster, he just knew it.

But here was Zuko, who just wanted to study and read and be Sokka's friend, Zuko who watched him with such interest, who wanted to listen to Sokka's voice, whose face fought so much against its forced tendency toward anger. God, he really was beautiful, scar and all, and now Sokka was in his bed, holding him, watching him sleep, in the little apartment that was clearly his sanctuary against the rest of the world. Most of the walls were bookshelves--filled with textbooks and fiction and poetry collections and anthologies--and the rest of the space was worn out, mismatched furniture and the clutter of unopened mail and loose notebooks and takeout boxes. It was homey in a way it shouldn't be, the way lonely places sometimes were. Sokka fit here, could fit here. In Zuko's apartment. In his bed. In his life.

Sokka was in love with him. Absolutely, idiotically in love with him, and they weren't even technically  _ dating _ . He was twenty-one and in love with a strange, damaged boy he'd known for a couple months. What the fuck was Sokka thinking?

But love wasn't based in thinking, was it? It was something else entirely, something primal and ancient, and he felt it looking down at the soft, sleeping man in his arms, being able to run his hand gently over his bare shoulder and down his side. Sokka had clearly given up on thinking for even longer, for as long as Zuko's breath ghosted across his skin.

It was ridiculous, it was insane, but all he could think of was the final stanza from the Blue Spirit's poem "Tell me About Love Stories," a few lines he'd read so many times he was pretty sure he had them memorized. He swallowed hard and whispered, hopefully too quiet for Zuko to wake up and hear him:

" _ Show me what lovers mean by forever, _ " he recited, feelings frightening and too large, " _ what it is to tuck myself up against your ribs and know you even with my eyes closed. _ "

He fell asleep not too long after, Zuko still in his arms and his cheek pillowed against his head, and he slept far more soundly than he could have imagined he would. He did eventually wake up to someone moving away, which he resisted, but when he next woke again, his arms were empty and he blearily opened his eyes. The room was still barely lightening with the risen sun, but Zuko was up and pulling on a pair of jeans. 

"Hey," Sokka murmured, rolling toward him and still a bit blurry with sleep, "you ok?"

Zuko turned back to face him, and his expression was gentle. 

"Hey there," he said, coming back over, "you don't need to be up yet if you don't want."

"Why're you up?" Sokka asked, tugging the blanket down so he could move more, and Zuko's smile was wry and tired.

"I rise with the sun whether I want to or not," he replied, "otherwise I'd still be curled up with you." 

Sokka smiled a little and pushed himself up to sitting, leaning on one hand and feeling the blankets puddle in his lap.

"Do I need to leave?" he asked, wondering how much had really changed, and Zuko watched him, eyes warm.

"Do you want to?"

Sokka managed to stifle a yawn as he considered.

Fuck it, he was gonna be honest. He had to. 

"I mean, not especially," he replied. "I  _ can _ , but I'm not really an early riser myself and I'd definitely prefer to stay here."

"Then stay," Zuko said without hesitation, running a hand through Sokka's hair, which made his skin tingle a little, "and sleep as long as you want. I'll be back later and we can… be together."

Sokka nodded and settled back down into the bed, still watching Zuko with low-lidded eyes.

"Sounds really nice," he said as Zuko straightened again. "Bring coffee."

Zuko chuckled, face still carrying a bit of that calm he's had in sleep. "I can do that." 

"And," Sokka said, throwing a hand out toward him again, "come back here and kiss me before you go."

And Zuko did, lovely and soft against his lips, and Sokka smiled into it, letting his eyes fall shut. Once Zuko stepped away, Sokka cuddled back down into the squishy pillow, surrounded by the smell of Zuko's skin and shampoo and laundry detergent, and fell back asleep. Secure, comfortable, at home.

When he woke up again, he was alone and the room was fully lit, throwing into sharp relief the sheer amount of books and school supplies stuffed into the limited space. The shelves were packed to bursting, books stacked vertically and horizontally however they'd fit and intermixed with notebooks and manila envelopes and colorful folders. There were also stacks of books on the floor and next to the bed and even under the bed it seemed, and it looked like a few books had even been squished in next to the microwave in its cubby. The kitchen otherwise was all dirty dishes and empty bags, notes and postcards tucked into the edges of the cabinets. It was basically all just one room, and yet somehow, the bedroom did feel cozy, and there were strange, specific touches of Zuko throughout. Sokka sat up, rubbing a hand through his hair and taking in the sun-scattered space. It felt important, somehow, that he'd been let into Zuko's home, been told about his ex and his family. That he'd been  _ left _ in Zuko's space, trusted here alone. 

Sokka peeled back the blankets and stood, still naked, and took a deep breath. 

He had to tell him. He was gonna tell Zuko he loved him. He had to try because this was too big, too important to keep hiding. The thought made his stomach twist a bit, but it was right. He knew it was. He didn't want to carry it alone anymore. And now, for better or worse, he trusted Zuko, trusted him to be truthful, to be kind, to maybe want him back.

But logistics first, while Zuko was still gone. Namely, clothes. They'd ended up somewhere in the intensity of last night, so he snooped through the apartment, slowly tracking down jeans, coat, underwear, and one sock from all manner of places they'd been thrown and dropped. His shoes at least were by the door, but still no shirt and no second sock, but it was a start. He couldn't help also taking in the apartment as he pulled on what clothes he could and kept looking for the others, grinning to himself at the particular of Zuko's home: notebooks shut around pens, books resting open and facedown, black clothes visible through a half-open closet door, disposable coffee cups forgotten on surfaces and kicked under the bed. 

He finally decided under the bed was worth checking too, when it seemed like everywhere else had been exhausted, because who knew what they might have kicked around while they were crashing together? He lay on his belly and shoved his hand underneath, groping blindly. He hit one of the forgotten coffee cups and tossed it behind him and pulled out an old textbook too and shoved it out of the way as his hand felt along the dust-bunnied floor. He then ran into a box blocking his progress, but he swore he could feel something fabricky behind it. He tugged, but it wouldn't budge, so he moved his attention to the box. 

It was surprisingly heavy as he hauled it out from under the bed and out of the way, but the fabric he managed to grab from behind it ended up being just a worn and dusty hoodie. He looked at it a moment, confused, but it definitely wasn't his. Sokka muttered to himself and moved to shove the box back under the bed again when something caught his eye through the folded flaps. Something oddly, unnervingly familiar. Before he thought it through, he flipped open the top flap. 

A large white envelope covered a few slim black books, only the sides visible, but they were glossy, an edge of abstract smoke recognizable even partially covered. Sokka's stomach turned over because there, labeling the envelope in Zuko’s angular cursive, were the words  _ Banished and Burning. _

***

_ Tell me about love stories. _

_ Not the  _ befores _ , infatuation and fragile-eyed glances. And not the beginnings either. We end our romances with beginnings: the first kisses, the declarations, the proposals and grand gestures. _

_ Tell me about the  _ after _. _

_ After we say the words, when we must uncrop the perfect picture. How does love eventually shift from noun to verb? _

\-- the Blue Spirit

Fuck not doing relationships. All those ideas, all those fears, all his reasoning for keeping things distant and casual? None of them applied to Sokka.

Sokka, who Zuko was clearly falling in love with, who he wanted in his home and his life. He wanted to tell him things, let him in, let Sokka know him. He selfishly hoped was still curled up in his bed when he returned from running errands, because if he was, that meant Zuko could sneak back in and peel back out of his jacket and his shirt and crawl in bed with him again, maybe wake him up with soft kisses all over his body, tell him how he felt once they were both fully awake. He thought--hoped--Sokka wanted the same thing, but it was worth it now to find out. It was worth the risk because damn… the way he felt about him could create hundreds of poems, all Shakespeare's sonnets, every goddamn thump of his heart in his chest. 

He finished by getting two coffees (Sokka's with cream and sugar the way he liked) and then headed back toward the apartment. It had only been about an hour and a half he'd been out running errands, so Sokka might still be sleeping, be waiting all warm and soft and beautiful in bed. He could picture the expanses of creamy skin, the loose, tousled hair, the blink of those impossibly blue eyes in the morning light as they opened. Zuko swallowed, getting nervous with wanting, but he needed to focus. He needed to think about what he'd say, how he'd say it. Did he just throw out that he was in love with him? Did he ask him out on a more formal date and then tell him? Did he write him a poem and confess his feelings and his identity all at once? He unlocked the apartment building doors and took the stairs up, still considering, and then adjusted the coffees to get to his keys again. He balanced the cups in the crook of his arm and kept thinking, rolling words around on his tongue. In case Sokka was still sleeping, he tried to turn the key quietly, get the door open without it creaking.

Sokka was not still sleeping. He was sitting, shirtless and cross-legged, in the middle of the floor near Zuko's bed, all-too recognizable papers and notes and formal documents laid out all around him. He raised his head as Zuko entered, eyes cold and hard as stones, and Zuko's blood turned to ice.

Oh no. Not like this.

"What is all this?" Sokka asked, still glaring at him and raising a few sheets of paper in either hand--drafts of his poems, printed emails from his publisher, contracts and agreement and so very, very much of Zuko's heart spilled out across those pages. The secret bits he'd kept hidden, always kept hidden.

"You went through my stuff," Zuko said, half-question, half-accusation, and Sokka's visage darkened further. 

"What," he said again, gritting out each syllable, "is all this?"

"Why did you go through my stuff?" Zuko demanded, fear careening quickly into anger because that was safer.

"I was looking for my damn shirt!" Sokka finally answered. "And instead I found  _ this _ . Found  _ you _ !" He jabbed the papers Zuko's direction, gaze unflinching.

Zuko stared at him for a long moment.

"You're the Blue Spirit," Sokka finally pronounced, and there was a barest hint of doubt there, as if hoping maybe this was just a misunderstanding, that there was a way for Zuko to talk his way out of this.

Too bad there wasn't.

"Yes," Zuko answered, voice soft, "I am."

Sokka's eyes were bright, all of him rigid like he was waiting for more, some explanation. But Zuko didn't have one, so he stayed back, kept his distance. He even took that tense moment to set the two coffees on the counter and rotate to face Sokka again. He folded his arms tight across his chest, the zipper on the pocket of his jacket cold against the inside of his wrist.

"And you didn't tell me," Sokka said finally, and then a flash of anger ripped across his features. "You let me talk and  _ gush _ and make a giant fucking fool of myself, and you  _ didn't tell me _ !"

Zuko opened his mouth, but no words came. Sokka wasn't wrong after all, whatever Zuko's intention might have been, however he'd justified it to himself.

"You shouldn't've gone through my stuff," Zuko said, unable to come up with anything else, and Sokka just glared.

"Why--was it some weird ego trip for you?" he demanded, shaking a fist of the papers at him. "You like listening to someone tell you how great you are while you play up this tragic artist bullshit? Is it some sort of fucked up power thing, because seriously--"

Zuko's face deepened into a glare. "That's not what this was at all! You seriously think I'm the sort of person who'd--"

"Then  _ what _ ?" Sokka said, voice raising to a shout. " _ Months _ , Zuko! It’s been  _ months _ !”

Zuko’s mouth opened and shut, stomach tight. “It’s… I…”

“Why--I don’t understand! You get off on secretly fucking your fans or something?” Sokka asked, expression twisted with disgust, with shame. “Get off on having some sappy, pining idiot on his knees while you lie to him?"

Zuko felt sick. "No!" he shouted back. "You think--that's not it at all! I didn't lie!"

Sokka's bark of laughter was wretched. "Sure, let's play with words, slant those definitions a little. You're a  _ poet _ so that's what you do, right?"

"You don't--" Zuko began hotly, taking a step forward, but Sokka's face had contorted again, crumpled completely. 

"Oh my god, my  _ notes _ ," he said, putting his face in his hands for a moment, and his words came out strangely broken. "Oh my god, you  _ read _ all my thoughts, my feelings, all my answers to the Blue Spirit's--to  _ your _ questions!" He jabbed a finger his way, and his eyes had gone sharp and glassy when they emerged again. "You had to know--I was trusting you." His face closed off again. "And you  _ still  _ didn't tell me! Seeing all that--that's so--how could you  _ do _ that?"

Zuko's heart twisted in his chest, guilt and horror, fixated on the wash of humiliation and anger thrown across Sokka’s face. He took another step forward, emotions tearing through him all at once.

"I meant to tell you--I should have," he said quickly. "I just--it had been so long then, and you were so excited to loan me the book, and I didn't want you to feel--"

"Exactly like this?" Sokka snarled, and it cut through Zuko like a razor. 

"Yes," he answered quietly. "Like this."

"But here we are anyway," Sokka said, dropping the papers and standing up, running his hands over his bare chest, up to his face again. "God, that day in the library when you wouldn't talk about the poems--"

"I wanted to tell you the truth!" Zuko said desperately. "I tried to! I never meant for it to get this far!"

"Right," Sokka said coldly, "because you don't do relationships."

Zuko went very still.

"Except that you  _ do _ ," Sokka said, glare cutting, "in every way that matters except the commitment, except the part that keeps  _ you _ from getting hurt! Who gives a shit if the other person gets hurt, right?"

Fuck Sokka saw him, carved right through him like a damn vivisection. How did he know him so well? How had Zuko let any of this happen?

"I didn't--I never meant for you to get hurt either," Zuko said quickly, "to feel like I was lying to you or leading you on or--" 

"Except you did  _ all of that _ !" Sokka yelled, spreading his arms, baring his body again. "All of it, because I fell for someone who's been lying about himself from the very beginning, from our first goddamn conversation!" His eyes were overly bright again, on the edge of angry, painful tears. "You let me fall in love with someone I don't even really know."

Zuko's body went, impossibly, colder. 

"Sokka, I…" he began, taking another step forward and extending his hands. Needing, hoping, desperate.

Sokka took a step back, put his own hand up between them. 

"Don't you dare fucking touch me," he said, icy and raw.

Zuko let his hands drop. 

"You… you  _ do  _ know me, though," he said, voice caught in his throat. "You know all of me, all the--" He motioned at the books and papers still spread on the floor. "It's all there! You knew me all along, and then I just--last night… I'm trying to let you into all of it! I  _ want  _ you to be part of all of it, all the parts of my life because you  _ do  _ know me!"

Sokka was staring at him still, and finally Zuko saw the sea in those eyes. He hadn't seen it until now, until it was a storm.

"I know two  _ very _ different people," Sokka said, voice like flint. "I know the Blue Spirit, and I thought I knew Zuko. But that Zuko, the one I--" he choked back the words, eye still all crashing waves and far-off thunder, "I thought he cared about me, even just a little.”

“Sokka--” Zuko began, feeling that statement like a blow to his chest.

“But if he did,” Sokka went on anyway, “that Zuko wouldn't let me make a fool of myself like this, let me expose so much and be so stupid and vulnerable and--and--" he swallowed hard, "and  _ still  _ keep lying to me."

"Sokka…" Zuko said, and there were tears behind his eyes too, getting tangled in his words, "that's never what I meant this to be--I swear! I was just afraid and it was stupid and I know how it looks but it was  _ never  _ about ego or some weird power trip for me. I do care about you--I've cared about you all along! I…" he dug his nails into the palms of his hands, "I fell in love with you too." He felt the words tear out of him. "Sokka, I  _ love _ you."

Sokka continued to stare, expression unmoving at Zuko's admission except for a slight part of his lips. 

"Maybe you do," he said softly, "but you clearly love your secrets more." 

Another slash across his heart. Another hole carved through him. Zuko tried to unball his hands, but they wouldn't go, the anger curling there again. 

"I thought you understood why I was secretive," he whispered, voice rough. "I thought you  _ understood _ ."

Sokka held his ground, voice rough with those unshed tears. "I can understand a lot. I was willing to take what you could give me."

Zuko couldn't inhale. Sokka's eyes crashed him against the shore.

"But not like this. Not this way." His voice had gone pain-laced again. "I understand about your family, about keeping them away and out of your life--but what have I  _ possibly  _ done to get shut out and lumped in with  _ them _ ?"

The air had left the room too quickly, all at once.

Because Zuko didn't have an answer to that. There wasn't one. Because Sokka wasn't Azula. He wasn't even Jet. But that's where Zuko had sorted him anyway, kept away from all the private, important parts of his life. His own little Sokka envelope, folded and tucked on a shelf separate from but right next to all the others.

He felt a tear skid down his right cheek and ignored it, the salt burning in his eyes.

"I'm leaving," Sokka said quietly. "Let me leave."

Zuko had the fleeting awareness that he was directly in front of the door, keeping Sokka from the exit.

"You don't have a shirt," Zuko pointed out as one ditch effort to keep him here, keep him talking, anything but watching the door shut behind him. 

Sokka stared at him coldly and then reached back, grabbed his coat, and pulled it on over his bare torso, zipping it halfway. 

"I'm leaving," he said, more firmly. 

Zuko could try to force him to stay, block the way and make him talk, make him listen. Do something stupid and drastic and desperate to keep him here.

Instead, Zuko stepped aside.

A moment later, Sokka was gone, the door closing with a finalizing click.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I apologize for the pain... We are unfortunately entering the "angst" portion of the story where the boys need to figure out THEMSELVES before they can figure out how to be together, but, just like it says in the tags, there WILL be a happy ending. We've just got a few chapters of sadness and self reflection before we get there. Sorry!
> 
> Hopefully you still enjoy, and if you have questions, comments, etc., please always feel free to comment or hop over to chat with my on tumblr at onmyliteraturebullshitagain
> 
> As any apology, I'll also update Midwest Zukka later today with something extra fluffy and humorous. Love you all!


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sokka and Zuko, now apart, both try to process who they are and who they actually want to be.

_ You have played, _

_ (I think) _

_ And broke the toys you were fondest of, _

_ And are a little tired now; _

_ Tired of things that break, and — _

_ Just tired. _

_ So am I. _

\-- E. E. Cummings

Sokka wasn't a crier, not usually. He didn't cry at movies or sunsets or broken bones, didn't cry when his dad remarried or while reading tragic books or when Katara had sometimes sobbed about their mom while Sokka held her. Sokka was the one who accepted, took whatever he could get with a smile, just kept moving forward and carrying those he loved with him. So crying? Giving in to all those things that ate away inside him? No. Not him.

He'd cried when his mom died. He remembered that, the funeral and all the grey-faced strangers, and he'd cried at seeing his mom, all still and cold and not-her, in the casket. He remembered feeling small, remembered the way his eyes stung and burned, the tears that wouldn't stop, the way his heart felt like it collapsed inside his chest. Those tears had been justified, unavoidable, a memory that still hung around his neck.

And he'd cried for Yue, at her hospital bedside with her hand in his the last time they talked. She'd been weak and small, her fingers brittle, and the disease just kept eating her apart, stealing her from him. He had kept hold of her hand anyway, tried to pretend there were no tears falling down his cheeks, no salt getting into his mouth. He'd cried by himself later, back in the trees where they'd played and carved their initials side by side. When he’d sat at the foot of a tree and pulled his knees up to his chest and didn’t have words for the blackness inside him. He'd cried when he saw the note she'd left him, the gentle way she'd accepted death and wished for him to be happy, keep living. He still had it, tucked away in the chest in his bedroom, folded and unfolded so often the ink had been worn away, half love letter, half eulogy.

He hadn't cried at the funeral, not in front of anyone. He'd hugged Yue's dad when he initiated, shaken hands with her other friends when they approached him, and he hadn't flinched, hadn't blinked. But safely alone, he'd cried when that knife-pain in his chest twisted too hard. When every night the moon came out and she was still gone.

He would not cry about Zuko, about the Blue Spirit, about this strange new loss.

He was lucky not to be stopped by Aang or Katara when he got home that morning, although they did both watch him with worried expressions as he headed immediately up the stairs. He couldn't talk to them, not yet, not now. There weren't any words to explain it, how betrayed he felt, how empty and foolish and sick. There weren’t words for mourning for something that had never existed at all, for losing something he’d created, imagined, believed in anyway. He pushed open his bedroom door, trying to focus, to breathe. Instead of feeling it, talking to people, he just needed to be logical, put on a clean shirt, sink himself into his classes. Zuko had been a terrible distraction anyway, and Sokka had things to focus on. School. Getting a job. Becoming an engineer. Doing something useful with his life like he was supposed to.

He refused to question any of that. He'd made choices and he was sticking to them.

Forcing himself to take a deep breath, he shut the door of his room, dropped his coat on the floor, and grabbed a shirt out of his dresser without looking at what it was. It didn't matter. He just tugged it on, grabbed a hoodie and pulled that on too, and then found an elastic for his hair again. His movements felt oddly mechanical, detached. But that was fine. What mattered was the  _ doing _ . He'd track down his books, start making a schedule, email his instructors about extra credit or getting a tutor. There were plenty of important things to keep his attention. No more distractions. No more stupid emotions.

Except that the Blue Spirit's-- _ Zuko's  _ poetry collection was on his bedside table, right on top, as well-loved as he'd left it. 

That was what did it. He sat on his bed, took the book in his hands, and couldn't seem to move past that moment. Caught, unable to let it go. Because all he saw when he looked at it now was Zuko: vulnerable on that balcony with his face half-lit, the way his eyes narrowed as he smiled, the feel of his hands on Sokka's skin, the passion in his voice, the vivid glint of his eyes, his soft breath as he fell asleep on Sokka's chest. God it  _ hurt _ , an entirely new kind of pain he didn't know how to carry around, how to live with as it festered inside him. He stroked his thumb across the all-too familiar cover, swallowed around the bitterness in his throat. 

He set the book--Zuko's book, what remained of Zuko in his life--gently on the floor. Even now, even knowing the truth, he couldn't bring himself to drop it or throw it or treat it roughly. It was a part of him, so much of his person scribbled out on those pages. But he also couldn't look at it. That hurt too much, hurt like pushing on a fresh bruise, and so he left it there on the floor and swung his legs up into bed.

And then he did cry, rolled to his side and toward the wall so the rest of the world couldn't see it. 

***

_ Can hearts be regrown, that shipwreck rebuilt?  _

_ Can we collect the ruins left under the stars and cobble the worthwhile pieces together, seam to seam? Craft something that will float, able to point toward the horizon and follow the freckle-map of summer stars. Make this new heart a cartographer, a philosopher, a captain. Make this new heart a collector of wind. _

_ Just make sure it's stronger than the last one. _

\-- the Blue Spirit

Sokka's shirt had ended up, somehow, flung over the lid of a laundry basket in the corner of the room. But Zuko knew immediately that it was his, knew the texture and the scent and the shape of it beyond question. Knew it with his fingertips, with his eyes closed.

Why was it the people who'd loved him always left shirts behind, the last piece he had to remember them by?

He'd ruined it all, just like with Jet, kept too much back and made himself far, far too difficult to keep loving. He remembered it too vividly, the way Jet had fought with him, trying to force him out into the light, trying to uncover him with enough persistence. He remembered his dark eyes and his hands on Zuko’s face and the glint of pain in his expression as Zuko shut him out. Different from Sokka’s, but from the same place. From Zuko. From a Zuko who kept them both away, at arm's length. And they'd both left.

At least Sokka had stayed around to tell him goodbye. 

You'd think once would have been enough to teach him, but apparently not. Apparently life wasn't done beating this lesson into his brain, and apparently he was a very, very stupid one of Pavlov's dogs who refused to salivate for the bell. And this lesson hurt worse because Sokka was  _ better _ , better than Jet had ever been. Jet had been an echoed back reflection of Zuko's own pain, the same sharp edges, the same disguises, the same unhealthy survival. Sokka had been something else entirely, pure and good and kind and patient, the kind of person who kept coming back. A person who, still asleep, had tried to keep Zuko within the safe circle of his arms even as he tried to move away.

He had deserved infinitely more than what Zuko had given him, and Zuko had known it all along. No wonder he'd been so damn afraid.

Zuko hadn't even realized he'd hugged the shirt to his chest, tucked his chin against it. God, everything hurt, a gaping, torn up hole in his middle, a new and hollow kind of pain. He didn't want a cigarette this time.

But he couldn't do this, couldn't just wallow around. He dropped the shirt on the bed and gathered up the books and papers from the floor, dumped everything back into that same box. Part of him was still angry, that Sokka had found it, that Sokka had gone looking. Although of course he  _ hadn't _ . Not really. He'd had no reason not to trust what Zuko told him, that he was who he said he was. He wouldn't have snooped on purpose because that wasn't  _ Sokka _ . It was Zuko with the trust issues and the damn chopped up parts of his life squirreled away from everyone around him. The whole thing was all just an accident, another stupid swing of chance taking Zuko out at the knees.

He shoved the now closed box back under the bed with a foot. It'd be so much easier if he could just stay angry, find someone else to blame.

He went to the kitchen, back to his regular idea of the day, ignoring the way his steps hitched. He reached for one of the coffees he'd brought and took a few scalding swallows. Of course it was the sweet one meant for Sokka, but he just drank it anyway and looked at his stupid kitchen and the stack of mail on the counter. He slid a hand through it, ignoring the junk mail and bills and ads, but nestled in the middle was an envelope filled out in bright purple pen and large letters. He grabbed that and tore it open, an example of the other--the only bright spot in his life. He could focus on that. He was careful of the doodles on the back as he peeled it open and pulled out Kiyi's delicately folded sheet of notebook paper.

_ Dear big brother, _

_ Hello how are you? I am fine. Did you dress up for halloween? I was wonder woman because she's a superhero and kicks butt like me. Except I can't actually kick any butts because mom says that's mean. Not even Morgan when she threw a worm at Lola and made her cry ... _

Kiyi continued for the rest of the paragraph about her friends and teachers and the things happening at her school, and it managed to pull him from that pain for a moment. He did wonder sometimes if Kiyi viewed their letters as her personal diary, based in part on the sheer volume of things she had to say and people she referenced like he had any idea who they were, but he didn't mind. Actually, in some ways it was better this way, the detailed descriptions of her life and her feelings and her thoughts and his presence only in the conceptual. She had a normal childhood, normal worries and dangers, and she was safe. That was what mattered. He took a shaky breath and kept reading. 

_ … Some man called here asking about you, but mom says I can't tell people where you live. The man sounded weird on the phone anyways and kept calling me names I didn't like. But I told him to leave my big brother alone and that made mom happy and the man mad. That was fun. _

_ Why can't I tell people where you live? Are you a spy? Are you a SUPERHERO? If you are and never said  _ _ we can't be friends anymore _ _!!! I wish I could be cool and sneaky like that so I could kick Morgan's butt and mom wouldn't know. Can I come over sometime? Is it cool there?  _

Damn, now there were tears in Zuko's eyes again, and he carried the letter over to the bed to finish reading it, feeling small and empty again. The bed that was still loosely unmade, still indented and soft with where Sokka had slept, and that made Zuko sick through his middle again. The place where Sokka's shoulder had dug into the mattress, the blankets that had pooled around his waist… Zuko swallowed hard and tried to focus on Kiyi, on the rest of the letter, on the reassurance that she hadn't said anything and that her mom was keeping her safe. That Ozai couldn't hurt her too, couldn't use her to hurt him. So there, he could just focus on his little sister, just pour his love into her because he didn't have to keep her separate from his life.

_ … Maybe I can see you again sometime soon. I wanna see your secret house but I have to go now. Bye! _

_ Sinceriously, _

_ Kiyi _

Kiyi. Kiyi, who he said he didn't have to keep out but had never been to his apartment, not even close to it. When they met, it was at playgrounds far away from here where they’d sit side by side on the swings and chat while their shared mother looked on. What had he possibly been hiding from her? Even there was that distance, that separation. Really, she didn't know anything real about him either, just like everyone else in his life. Sure, he answered when she asked what his favorite dinosaur was and if he'd seen  _ Frozen,  _ told her he was 'in school' to encourage her to do her own homework, but even with her, his baby sister, he'd kept his secrets. A literal child who looked up to him and wrote him letters, and he still kept her a step away from his life out of fear.

Sokka. Kiyi. Jet. Everyone. All sorted into the same basket with his abusive dad, kept at arm's length.

Had he really been broken that badly? Did he really love his secrets, his fears, his vulnerabilities, more than he loved anyone that actually mattered?

He lay back into the dip where Sokka had been so recently and yet so long ago, the letter still in his hand and his eyes burning. The pillow still smelled just a little like Sokka, and somehow, that made the pain all the deeper. It washed through him, too big and too loud and too much.

He was still angry--at Sokka, at himself, at his family, at the fucking world--but more than that he ached like he'd been dissected, all the parts of him spread out on a table and now he had to look at them directly, those things he'd hidden, buried, neglected. Those things he pretended he could ignore. He shut his eyes but couldn't look away.

Mentally and distantly, he began to write again. Something new. Something better.

***

_ Let me not to the marriage of true minds _

_ Admit impediments. Love is not love _

_ Which alters when it alteration finds, _

_ Or bends with the remover to remove. _

_ O no! it is an ever-fixed mark _

_ That looks on tempests and is never shaken; _

_ It is the star to every wand'ring bark, _

_ Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken. _

\-- William Shakespeare

Sokka skipped the poetry class until Professor Iroh actually emailed him to check up and see if everything was alright and say that he missed having him at lectures. And really, Sokka missed the class. He'd always liked it, looked forward to it and not just because of Zuko. And with the grades in his other classes, he probably needed this one to at least keep his GPA from tanking completely. So he sighed and packed up his bag and went, fully prepared for the awkwardness, for not looking at each other and pretending the other didn't exist.

You know, like they were twelve years old. 

But when Sokka got there, Zuko was nowhere to be seen. This should have been a relief, but instead, he felt strangely sad, disappointed even. He forced himself not to think about it as he took his seat and pulled out his textbook, waiting for Professor Iroh to actually start the class. He was skimming through the poems for today--love poems, because the universe fucking hated him--and only looked up as people filed into class. It seemed wrong, somehow, that there were all these people still just living their lives, just going about their days like the world hadn't turned inside out and then been thrown in a woodchipper. He scratched his eyebrow with the end of his pencil and looked up as the last person came into class. 

Zuko. 

He actually stopped completely when he saw Sokka, eyes going wide, but he managed to cover it quickly. Sokka looked back down at "Sonnet 116" and tried to pretend all his senses weren't orienting after Zuko, feeling as he crossed the room, listening as he sunk into one of the desks with a creak. Shit, everything in him wanted to look his way, go to him, hand-wave away the pain between them and pretend they could just talk and fuck and laugh like they had before. Like they weren't two broken pieces. Like they didn't love each other.

Professor Iroh started the class, pulling Sokka's attention away. He went quickly through attendance and shot Sokka a smile as he said "here" in a voice that cracked at the end. 

Sokka did not look at Zuko. 

"Alright, so we started last class discussing the conventions of love poetry," Professor Iroh said, picking up his own copy of the textbook, "and you read a few famous examples for today: one by William Shakespeare, one by Elizabeth Barret Browning and one by Maya Angelou.” He smiled out at them. “So where would you like to begin?”

A few people chimed in about sonnets and the difference in the portrayal of love based on time period, some referencing the difference when the speaker was a woman versus a man. The blonde guy made one of his dense comments. Someone offered a compelling comparison to another poem they'd discussed early. It should have been interesting, and Professor Iroh guided the conversation well, but Sokka was still struggling to focus on any of it. His notes and textbook were completely blank, and even looking over the poems and going to the lines referenced by the discussion felt foggy.

And then Zuko’s voice broke through his thoughts.

"Shakespeare's speaker is saying that love is loyalty--'looks on tempests and is never shaken'," he said, voice a bit scratchier than sometimes. "Just like Browning's ideas about it being pure and selfless."

Sokka couldn't hold back his snort, which conveyed considerably more than he'd meant it to. "It's loyal when it's the love between people on the same footing--'true minds'," he said, staring straight ahead even as he felt his skin prickle.

Professor Iroh nodded and turned to the class to ask another question, but Zuko cut back in. 

"It's an 'ever-fixed mark'," he said, maybe a bit tersely. "And Shakespeare's speaking about love as a larger concept, which means regardless of circumstance."

"No, because Shakespeare ends by focusing on  _ time _ ," Sokka argued, still refusing to look toward Zuko at all, even as his voice rose, "which means a building of commitment, a relationship. Only  _ then _ is it unchangeable."

"That's inferring a lot from the poem," Zuko retorted, a kind of sorry bitterness bleeding through, and Sokka heard his feet squeak against the floor as he shifted.

"That's what this whole class is about," Sokka responded tartly, still looking at a somewhat baffled Professor Iroh rather than at Zuko. "And it's supported by Browning's poem too, considering her whole 'depth and breadth and height my soul can reach' love is toward her  _ husband _ , so there's truth and commitment as the foundation of love again."

"Now," Professor Iroh said, cutting in, "we don't know for sure who the loved one or intended audience was for these poems, but--"

"So maybe it's less about the partner and more about the person writing," Zuko argued, voice tight. "Is the speaker truly in love if their love falls apart when it's tested?"

Sokka let out a bitter sort of laugh. "Well, Shakespeare offers us that option at the end--if this isn't true, maybe love isn't real at all."

"That's not what that ending means," Zuko said, sounding both sharp and sad, and Sokka had to work to keep from looking his way, still able too clearly to imagine the vibrancy of those eyes, the conviction in that face. "The speaker argues that if, somehow, he's proven wrong in this, then he never wrote it  _ and  _ no one ever loved. He's saying it can't be disproven, not really."

"That's a good way to bring us to that rhyming couplet--" Professor Iroh began, but Sokka couldn't stop himself.

"If the speaker's so damn sure of that," he said, "then he must have found someone who truly loved him back in the same way, where they were on true and equal footing--'a marriage of true minds'."

He heard Zuko move again as he said, "I guess we'll never know."

"It's really too bad," Sokka finished, knowing it was a low blow, "we can't ask the poet himself."

The room was oddly tense in it's quiet after that, but Iroh managed to bring the class back around and get more discussion offered by other students. Sokka looked back down at the book, his anger draining away again in the face of that achy hurt. Finally, he couldn't hold it in anymore, and he glanced aside at where Zuko was still tucked in the corner. He was writing something again, oddly pulled into himself, but he looked up while Sokka watched him. Their eyes met only a moment, a flash of gold attached to too many emotions, before Sokka jerked his face away, but it was enough. Enough to punch him right in the chest again.

He left class as soon as they were dismissed, basically flinging his backpack over his shoulder to flee. What sucked was he immediately wanted coffee, just like old times, but he couldn't let himself. He escaped and went home and hid in his room. God, just seeing Zuko brought back that surge of embarrassment, the bone-deep sense of betrayal and foolishness. That he'd let himself be so stupid, so naïve, so easily taken in by a beautiful, difficult boy who talked about poetry. So all he could do was try to focus on his other homework and not look at the poetry book still on the floor by his bed, sitting there, mocking him. He couldn't pick it up and he also couldn't kick it under the bed or put it away. 

So it stayed there, a constant reminder of what a giant lovesick fucker he'd let himself become.

***

_ Did you know most of the stars we can see died ages ago? What we view above is an echo, a memory, the continued path of light from something lost.  _

_ When I pray upward for self-actualization, do I plead with ghosts? When I extend my hands, are they really just the moss-pattern of scars, white with time? _

_ When we knit our fingers together, is that hand I hold any less empty than those suns with their death knells lightyears out of time? _

\-- the Blue Spirit

Zuko shouldn’t have gone to the poetry class. He shouldn’t have talked. He shouldn’t have argued. He shouldn’t have let himself look at Sokka again and feel the incredible, overwhelming tide of loving him that drowned him all over again. 

He’d been so stupid, so terrible, so wrong. And Sokka, the Sokka he still loved was angry, petty, hurting. God, it was all destroyed.

But he couldn’t linger on that. He couldn’t. He had to move forward. He had to finally learn like he hadn’t before, finally make progress. So he sat down, took a deep breath, and made himself write Kiyi a letter. He tucked himself into the loveseat, sheet of paper on a textbook for a writing surface, and made himself be clear and careful on the page.

_ Dear little sister, _

_ Hey how are you? I’m fine too. Well, actually, I’m a little sad right now because I realize you’re right that you’ve never been to my house. So I’m gonna talk to Mom about you coming over sometime if you want. It’s not as fun as you’re thinking, though, because, unfortunately, I’m not a superhero. Not like you, Wonder Woman! I’m just a regular guy. Just your big brother. ... _

He went on, sure to address the whole Morgan and Lola drama and what Kiyi was studying in school and all the other elementary school politics she was dealing with. He told her that, no, he hadn’t dressed up for Halloween, but maybe next year. He told her about his own classes and tests and papers and whatever funny or simple stories he could come up with about his own classmates. Too many of the ones he wanted to share, though, involved Sokka, his presence bleeding through all parts of Zuko’s life somehow. His absence was like cutting away chunks of a film strip and trying to still make sense of the movie without those scenes. Without it’s hero.

Zuko swallowed around those feelings and kept them off the page as much as he could, tried to find ways around them.

_ … Thank you for not telling that man where I live. I don’t know how much Mom has told you, but just know he’s definitely a bad guy. I don’t want him to be part of any of our lives. You  _ _ especially _ _ are way too cool for him, trust me. It’d be like Wonder Woman having to be around Lex Luther. Or is that the wrong character? You’ll have to educate me next time we talk. _

_ Thanks for writing to me. Have I told you enough how much I love your letters? I hope you know, and I hope we can see each other again soon. _

_ Sinceriously, _

_ Zuko _

It was something. It was a start. It was dipping his toe into trying to be brave, one step up a staircase he’d spent far too long afraid to climb.

But there was more to do, and he’d decided to do it. 

Zuko gathered up what he could into a folder--blue, unintentionally, but obviously correct once he had it in hand. He forced himself to open up that box under the bed again and go through it, all the documents he’d quickly dumped on top and shoved out of sight again once Sokka was gone. He pulled them out now, sat on the floor like Sokka had, and spread them out in front of him. He sorted out the formal documents in one pile--unnecessary, not what he needed--and instead focused on the drafts he’d tucked away within. Some, he knew, were other places around the apartment too that he’d have to track down. But this was a place to start. Early version of his poems, his pen-marks and cross-outs and circles and scribbles muddying the pages. The parts of his writing he didn’t show people, the messiness of that process, of trying to wrangle his feelings into words, trying to understand himself this way.

He found other drafts around the apartment: folded up into books, half-crushed in notebooks, some waiting to be printed off his computer. He gathered them all, stacked them together, tucked them into the folder.

He hesitated finally on his newest, least complete work, the rawness sitting there, waiting to be written further.

Could he truly give an unfinished, sad, terrible draft to the person who’d inspired it, who was meant to have it?

He looked at the blank document and grabbed a pen. It shouldn’t be so hard. It shouldn’t be hard at all, to just exist.

To be brave, be honest, be himself.

_ For Sokka, someday. If I can ever do him justice  _ he scratched across the top of the page, and his heart continued its reckless, hammering progress in his chest as he went through the rest of the poem for quick reminders and revisions and then tucked it in with the others in the folder.

Then he turned to a fresh document.

_ Write it!  _ Bishop had said, and Zuko would.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks again for all of you still hanging out through this emotional ride! Our boys are starting to progress emotionally, but they're also young and angry and stubborn and hurt. So it's gonna take them a little bit of time to find their way back to each other again.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There are realizations, the beginnings of communication, and poems being shared.

_ There will be time, there will be time _

_ To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet; _

_ There will be time to murder and create, _

_ And time for all the works and days of hands _

_ That lift and drop a question on your plate; _

_ Time for you and time for me, _

_ And time yet for a hundred indecisions, _

_ And for a hundred visions and revisions _

\-- T. S. Eliot

Sokka kept going to the poetry class, because he did like it, and he liked Professor Iroh, and he needed the grade. Mostly he just stayed quiet and focused on the poems and didn't look at Zuko. Even his presence across the room was halfway suffocating, just knowing his hands were there fidgeting with his rings, his hair was falling across his face, he was licking his lip as he thought. Just that, being near him, hearing him speak, sometimes made him feel it all over again. To be confronted again with the disjointed memories of that last night and that last morning they'd had together.

He kept moving forward, soldiered on. It was who he was, who he’d always been. 

But a strange, little part of him had also recognized that maybe that wasn't  _ enough _ all the time. Maybe that was why he ended up feeling trapped by Engineering, why he kept feeling a little pummelled by life, why he'd let Zuko set all the rules while Sokka just followed along. Why he'd ended up feeling so damn shattered when it ended. He'd eventually, and begrudgingly, and uncomfortably, told Katara what had happened between him and Zuko and why he'd been so quiet and distant the last few weeks. He needed someone who knew him, could be objective, and Katara was persistent in her prodding.

"Quiet you is disconcerting," Katara had said, nudging him with a knee while they sat on the couch post dinner, just the two of them. "So come on, grumpy. Talk to me."

He’d eyed her distrustfully but eventually told her, as best he could, a safe for work version of it all. He still couldn’t look at her and kept his voice suitably detached and his heart safely shut in a cupboard again as he explained. When he finished, Katara was quiet for a long time, all the teasing out of her face and the house feeling old and empty and cavernous around them. He pulled a knee up to his chest and didn't speak.

“Do you remember… after Mom died?” Katara asked, which made no sense at all and made Sokka’s skin prickle.

“No, Katara,” he said sarcastically, “I forgot.”

She smacked his arm. "Listen to me, will you?”

Sokka dropped his chin on the knee tucked up by his chest and nodded.

“You know how grateful I am for how much you took care of me after all that, right?" Katara went on.

Sokka scoffed, exasperated and still confused. "What are you talking about?  _ You  _ were the one who immediately mothered us and did all the laundry and--"

Katara nudged him again. “Yeah, I know, but that’s not what I’m talking about,” she said, almost shortly. “You were the one I could come to when I was crying or got scared of the dark or missed mom--not Dad, not Gran Gran. You. Didn’t matter what you were doing or how you were feeling. If I needed you, you’d sit up with me or hug me as long as I wanted or tell me stupid jokes to make me laugh. Remember?"

"What does this have to do with--" Sokka started, but Katara cut him off with a glare.

"You always took care of me  _ that _ way, always gave me that sort of safety," she continued. "You  _ never _ let me know if you were sad or scared or lonely too, or reminded me that you were only a year older than me and just a kid too. And I needed that then, so much…"

Sokka stared out across the empty wood floor of the room, not really seeing it, heavy with the weight of those memories.

“And I know,” Katara said, voice even quieter, “you did the same thing for Yue.”

“I don’t--” Sokka said, swallowing around the lump that appeared in his throat. “I don’t wanna talk about this--about her.”

All it made him think of was old hurt, rough like a scar, but even that just created a strange juxtaposition-- soft fingertips on his tattoo, the glint of kind eyes in the dark, those same eyes closing like shutters only hours later. Zuko's jacket and his folded arms and Sokka with that tattoo still on display, all raw emotion and soft underbelly. A similar twist of hurt, that feel of losing something beloved.

“You were the only person she’d still see at the end, you know,” Katara went on anyway, resting their legs together in a way that was the gentlest of solidarities. “Just you. And I know it was because you were being with her the way you were for me--putting away your own feelings and pain and making her happy, being there for her and what she needed."

"She was… she was  _ dying, _ " Sokka choked out, and it tasted like sand. "And you were a crying kid. What the hell else was I gonna do?"

He was coming off brittle and defensive and he didn't know why, but he'd already thought about Mom and Yue. He'd already felt that pain again and it seemed uncharacteristically cruel of Katara to bring it up to him now.

"We both needed it. And we both love you for taking care of us,” Katara said, “but… maybe that's not the relationship you're supposed to have with everybody forever."

Sokka looked over at her, feeling his eyebrows pull together and the downturn of his lips. He leaned harder into his pulled up leg, feeling it press into his sternum.

"I don't… do that," he said with so little certainty it was unnerving.

"Well, it just seems like…" Katara ventured carefully, "maybe that’s what you were doing for Zuko too.”

“It wasn't--it's not the same,” Sokka said immediately, stomach tight, and he dug his fingernails into his jeans without realizing he was doing it. He pictured a face on a balcony, touched both with past and present fire.

Katara put up a hand. “Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe I’m wrong, but…”

Sokka tipped his face toward her, just barely, because his insides still hurt and Katara knew him, understood him, and at least she was here. “But?”

“But you know you’re allowed to… need things from people too, right?” Katara asked.

Sokka frowned. Of course he knew that. He wasn’t stupid. He knew he had, you know, emotions and desires and things he wanted. Obviously he  _ knew  _ that he was allowed to need and want things from other people.

Didn’t he?

That thought haunted him even after Katara had given him a hug and told him she was always around if he needed to talk and that he was gonna get through it. It haunted him as he resumed classes and listened to his Chemistry professors drone on and his Mechanical Tech TA explain final projects. It haunted him as he walked into Professor Iroh’s class and stayed in the back and took notes and focused on the lectures.

He’d spent so long just accepting what he was offered and being there for other people. What did it even  _ look  _ like to want things for himself?

For a tentative start, it looked like starting to participate in poetry class a little more again, talking to Katara and Aang in veiled sort of questions about majors and career paths and his dad, playing at normalcy and trying to make friends and pretending he didn’t still miss Zuko like a chunk of his heart had been carved off.

He still couldn’t look at him in class, even with that constant awareness of him, but at least they’d been mature enough not to argue via poetry again. And Zuko stayed away from him as well, although Sokka wasn’t entirely sure if it was out of respect for Sokka’s feelings or just as another way to protect himself again.

He found out when he was walking out of poetry class one day and heard the slap of feet on the tile behind him.

"Sokka?" came Zuko's familiar voice again, husky and careful and out of a dream.

It was like hooks in his skin, pulling Sokka back toward that voice and that body and that person. Sokka forced himself to keep walking, to hold himself tall.

He was allowed to need things--want things from people. He… he didn’t have to just accept everything. 

"I don’t wanna talk to you right now," he said, not looking at him and hating that his voice still came out childish. 

"I know," Zuko said, coming up beside him as they walked (like old times, when Sokka thought things were so good), "I get it. But please, just a second and I promise I won't bother you again…"

Sokka let out a low sigh and paused, still not turning his head, but that didn't stop him being aware of Zuko moving to stand in front of him. Being aware of the shape and space of him, the subtle smell of his skin, the movement of his breath and body.

"Sokka, I'm so sorry," Zuko said immediately.

Sokka wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting, but it wasn’t that. He looked up sharply and met Zuko’s eyes. 

They were bright and a little red like he hadn't been sleeping, smudged at the edges, but still so goddamn beautiful and vivid. But his expression, the lines under his eyes, the sad pull of his lips, was so broken it stabbed at Sokka's heart all over again. 

"I… I didn't say that before," Zuko continued softly, "that morning when I should have. I was being selfish, but I was… I was wrong. This is my fault." 

Sokka watched the line of his throat as he swallowed, feeling too many strange things at once, and Zuko made a half-aborted gesture toward him, hand falling mid-way. 

"I wanted to be sure you knew that. That I'm… I'm so sorry I hurt you,” Zuko finished, voice tight.

Sokka watched his face, feeling pained and disconnected still, and didn't know what to say. Everything felt off-kilter.

"Well… thank you," he said finally, voice rough. "But I… we can't…" 

Sokka took a breath, made himself be reasonable. 

"For my part, I'm sorry too,” he said. “For… looking. Even if it was an accident, and," his stomach dropped, "for the shitty things I said. They weren't fair and--I wasn’t--" He broke off, unsure what he was even trying to say. All he could focus on were Zuko’s eyes, being pulled into them again.

Zuko nodded, expression still pained. "Thank you. I just…I should have told you, before," he said, voice soft. "I hope--I thought…" He bit his lip and exhaled, his eyes bright.

Sokka couldn't stand it.

"I'm sorry, but this doesn't--it can't change what happened," he forced himself to say even against the way his stupid heart swelled again. "I still don't  _ know _ you, not like I thought I did, and that--I don't know how to do this now." His stomach twisted, and Zuko's expression flinched too. 

"I know," Zuko said quietly. "I know."

Still, he reached into his bag and pulled out a slim blue folder. He held it out to Sokka, who stared at him in confusion and didn't move to take it. 

"I realize this doesn't really change anything between us," Zuko said, words careful and intentional, "and it's probably still too late, but it felt… right. Fair. That you should be able to read these."

Sokka looked at the folder again and then back at his eyes.

"What is it?" he asked.

"Right," Zuko said, flushing a little. "Um, they're early drafts of my poems, the ones I could track downs, the ones with my notes and revisions and stuff--I know it's not the same as your notes," he added quickly as Sokka's lips parted, "but you still deserve to see them. See some of my private thoughts and writing too, to actually know me like you thought you did. If you want. If it would help."

Sokka stared at the folder again, a strange nervousness running through him, but he took it out of Zuko's hand. Zuko let it go, careful that their fingers didn't touch. 

"Zuko…" Sokka said quietly, unable to look at him again, eyes fixed on the folder, on the blurred edges of the world around them.

"I don't expect anything from you," Zuko whispered, "because you were right. About me. Who I am. And I’m trying… I’m trying to fix it, but I understand…” He broke off, chewing at a bit of loose skin on his lower lip.

Sokka looked up at him then, and all he could see were all those things he'd fallen in love with: the curve of his mouth, the expression in his eyes, the furrow above his nose. It hurt to look at, to feel so idiotic again, to still want him so damn badly.

"I didn't…" Sokka said quietly, "I didn't wanna hurt you either. I don't… I still don't want to see you hurt."

Zuko's smile was slim.

"And that's why you're so good, so… who you are," he murmured. "But this, it's just what I can do. Offering you this. Something you deserve. Because I…" he swallowed hard, "because I still love you. So much that it aches inside me sometimes, the way I feel about you."

Sokka couldn't break his gaze, heart squeezing in his chest, and part of him wanted to throw it all away, pull him into his arms again and say that none of it mattered, that it was fine, that Sokka could settle for whatever Zuko wanted to offer.

But he couldn't. It  _ did _ matter. 

"I…" he murmured, unable to hold it in, "I do too--god, I do too. I know those feelings, that ache, but right now... I  _ can't _ , Zuko." His heart had moved into his throat. "I can't."

God did he  _ want  _ to, though, and that was a whole other sort of pain.

"I get it," Zuko said, voice small. "Just, um, enjoy the poems--the Blue Spirit. Me. If you want to."

Sokka looked at the folder again. 

"When do you need them back?" he asked.

Zuko shook his head. "Just… someday. Whenever you're ready."

It was too hard, just standing in that stupid old hallway and missing someone who was right there, something that wasn’t quite the same anymore, so Sokka nodded and took the folder and turned to leave. He walked, purposeful, controlled, and Zuko didn't follow him. Sokka wasn't sure what he would have done if he had. 

He went to the library, that empty downstairs again where they'd studied and talked and kissed, and that hurt too. But he found a table and sat, unsure what he'd do now. He set the folder in front of him, and it seemed huge, looming, radioactive. Sokka had thought about the poetry book he'd shared as his heart, freely offered for appraisal. If that was true, then this was Zuko's heart too, held out. At last exposed.

He didn't touch it, not yet, not sure he wanted to at all, not sure he could handle seeing what was there. He didn't know if it would help suture up the wound or just make it deeper, if it would tear them apart further or bring them back together. He didn't know anymore what he was willing to risk.

The room was too quiet and his heart was too loud. He opened the folder and pulled out the papers within. 

It was a variety: loose notebook pages with fringy edges, printed Word documents, one sheet of plain printer paper, and one napkin with a coffee ring over part of the corner. He started with that napkin, unable to hold back his small smile at something so distinctly Zuko. And yet on the napkin were stanzas Sokka recognized, written in tiny black pen. Some of the words had been changed or rearranged or taken out, but it was still easy to connect to the version that had made it to publication:

_ Tell me about this body. _

_ Brindle-hearted wanderer. I would go to you if my soul was not a split open pear. _

_ I want to be purged of all of this but there's too much inside me. My skull breaking with the strain of holding all the fractured and broken portions of myself inside. _

_ The yellowing bruise, the blood between my teeth. I'm heavy with holding back my brittle, frightened voice from calling out. _

_ I am a house after a fire, all ash and dirtying to the touch. _

The Blue Spirit, in Zuko's handwriting with his slashes and sideways notes-to-self along the edges. As recognizable as all the lecture notes they shared, the comments they jotted on each other's papers, the words in the margins of books he'd been loaned. The Blue Spirit as familiar as the book still on the floor beside his bed.

Sokka didn't know what to do, what the throb of feeling in his chest meant.

Next he pulled out a notebook sheet with chunks of a different poem, one that had changed a lot by the time it made it to print, and it was slashed up and overwritten and heavy with an obvious pain. Words like  _ broken _ and  _ loss  _ and  _ blood _ scraped across the page, annotations about emotion, rawness, symbols. One of the Word documents then, mostly clean except for a few circles and the note at the bottom:  _ what is this really about? is this really how i feel? this empty and alone?  _ Sokka ran a finger over that line, heart heavy. The printer page, with chunks of different poems, pen changing mid way as the first one died, more diary than poetry in its word choice and vividness.

He kept paging through, the words, the scribbles, the questions, the different colors of pens and pencils, the different fonts and line breaks and commentary, the creases and smoothed edges and obvious folds. So strangely, how recognizably Zuko it all seemed now. How had he missed it before? He wondered if this was how Zuko had felt as he'd read Sokka's notes too. The sacredness of it, the pain of being seen and known. 

He didn't know. He couldn't ask.

_ Tell me, tell me, tell me _ the poet begged through every line, like the rise and fall of the tide. 

"I wanted to," Sokka whispered to the invisible Zuko on the page. "I would if you'd let me."

Sokka set the poems aside and pulled the last document free. It was typed and printed, more outline and list than poem, but what caught Sokka's eye was the ink scrawled at the top of the page:

_ For Sokka, someday. If I can ever do him justice _ .

Sokka read the line again, a few more times, trying to believe that it was actually true. Zuko--the Blue Spirit--writing something for  _ him _ . He scanned the page, knot in his throat, and the first line:  _ tell me about the color blue _ . Under that was a bulleted list, scattered and sporadic. Of blue things (oceans, lakes, sky, stones) and emotions (longing, understanding, fascination, connection) and allusions (Bishop, Donne, Homer, Hughes). Sokka kept going over them, these bits pieces of how Zuko saw him. He kept reading down to disconnected pieces of lines and stanzas, mostly typed, sometimes scribbled on with the same pen from the top. But every piece, every line was strange and unpolished and beautiful in its honesty:

_ I described you as an ocean. I drank you in like sky and told you about the pleasure of drowning. _

_ loving you is cliches, is stolen words, but if anyone in earth or heaven deserves the poets, then god, my god, it's you _

_ You are so much more than you can realize, how it feels to be viewed through those morning-born eyes _

_ Because he's all states, and all princes, I. He is Donne’s compass and Shakespeare muse and Brownings lover, and I can’t find the words enough to explain the drum-echo of my heart _

_ He is why my flowers keep opening. I am unworthy hands but still, for him, I'd seek _

_ You knew me without form before. Know me again. Please let me love you better a second time _

Sokka stared at the page, awed and silenced and almost frightened of the intensity here, of so much feeling poured out without reservation or caveat. 

Zuko's heart. 

These words were… for him. Sokka, who had spent his whole life taking what he could get and not ask for more. Sokka, who wasn't exceptional, just another lost person wandering this campus. Sokka, who was just learning to want things from people and still wasn’t sure he deserved it. And yet, these words, spilled out upon the page, were meant for him. He wasn't sure he was breathing.

He thought he finally understood what Zuko meant by drowning.

***

_ Tell me about being touch starved. _

_ But no, that's my story not yours, because I'm brimstone blood in technicolor. Desperation that aches under my sternum, and I just want the brush of your fingertips, your heart-heated palm.  _

_ I just need the feeling, to trust that I am worthy of your hands, that I am not a supernova burning anything that comes too near. _

\-- the Blue Spirit

"You're really not going to tell him about the reading tonight?" Uncle Iroh asked, but Zuko just shook his head again. 

"No," he replied, leaning his elbows on the table in his uncle's familiar kitchen, the only other place in his life that was sort of home. "I told him I'd leave him alone now, so I will."

"Did he say anything about the poems? It's been a few days…" Iroh replied, refilling Zuko's teacup while early morning sun spilled across the little table.

"No, Uncle," Zuko said tiredly, "but it's not about getting something back." He rubbed a hand down his face. "I gave him those because he was right and he deserved the same truth and vulnerability from me. That I was done loving my secrets more than the people in my life."

The words felt heavy in his mouth, heavy like his damn, exhausted eyelids.

"But doing this reading shows that as well, shows that you care about him and his feelings," Iroh insisted, leaning forward. "You're literally coming out from behind the mask."

Zuko swallowed. "I know." He fiddled with the teacup, worry brewing again. "But everything does still just say "the Blue Spirit," right? Because I'm ready to come on out of the metaphorical poetry closet, but I'm  _ not  _ ready for Ozai and Azula to find me."

Iroh shook his head. "There's nothing that would connect you to the Blue Spirit or to this particular performance venue," he replied, "and Ursa and I have made sure they think you live in an entirely different town. You are as safe as we can make you."

His uncle’s face was sad as he said it, and Zuko knew it hurt him, Zuko’s history, the sins of their shared family. He took a breath and nodded, trying to give his uncle a reassuring smile. Logically he knew that his family was still kept away, that he was, like Iroh said, as safe as he could be, but it was also good to hear it. It was terrifying enough thinking of actually reading his poems out loud to strangers without also risking the threat of his dad again. There was a reason hiding had been such a reflex, a reason the Blue Spirit didn't do public readings, didn't show his face, stayed unknown.

Until now.

The day of the reading was also the day they got their midterm essays back in class, and everyone waited in an awkward sort of line at the end of the period as Iroh passed them out. Zuko wasn't near Sokka, and he couldn't decide if the people keeping them apart made him feel better or worse. But he took back his essay and flipped it open to scan the notes and the grade: B+, which seems about right, although if he was feeling better, he'd probably tease his uncle for not showing more favoritism. He sighed and paused to put the essay in his bag, stepping aside to let other students pass.

"Mr. Amaruq, a moment?" Iroh asked, and Zuko couldn't keep from looking up as Sokka approached Iroh and the essay he held out in his hand. 

He wondered if he'd read the poems, the notes. If it had meant anything to him at all.

It had to. Sokka knew how powerful poetry was. He had to have understood what Zuko was saying.

Regardless, Zuko had done enough eavesdropping on Sokka's privacy, so he flipped his bag shut and hurried out, forcing himself to concentrate on tonight and the reading and not throwing up with nerves. 

He decided what to wear with a kind of distance, haunted by the memories of Sokka slipping each ring off his hand, pulling him out of his layers, baring his own tattooed skin. He went simple, no adornment, no rings, no nothing. Black t-shirt and jeans, black nails because they were already painted and chipped, but otherwise, just him. Slim and scarred and pale and himself. He rubbed the hair out of his face and grabbed the box of his books he still had. Then he very purposefully didn't let himself tuck an emergency pack of cigarettes into his jacket pocket. No more smoke and mirrors. No more self-hating coping methods.

If he was gonna come into the light, he'd do it standing on his own two feet. 

The performance venue was really just a little independent coffee shop/bookstore tucked into an off-street downtown, the "stage" just a slightly raised platform at the back. But it held poetry slams and local author readings not infrequently, and they did carry a few copies of his book already. It had good coffee and only enough room for about fifty people sitting at the tables and Uncle knew the owner. So it really was safe. It would be safe. His dad and his sister wouldn't find him. It was just a bunch of other college students and people who liked books, regular people just like him.

The world wasn't only full of threats. 

Zuko could exist. He could read his weird thoughts in front of strangers who wouldn't know him as anything but a poet, as himself. He could do this. He set up quickly, nodding as the owner called him the Blue Spirit and told him he'd get a quick introduction and could then start the reading. Zuko nodded, still sick in his gut as he dropped his jacket over the back of his chair, and ordered a coffee so at least he had something to do as he waited. 

People wandered in slowly, some clearly there for the Blue Spirit, some obviously just there for drinks and somewhere to hang out. Zuko felt jittery, tense, wrong all at once. Fuck, he wanted a cigarette. Why hadn't he let himself bring them? But no, no more of that. He made himself take a deep breath, watch the people talk and move and settle into seats and smile at each other. Something in his chest felt achy with watching them, bitten in half with wanting. He looked at the volume he'd chosen to use for the reading, the new papers he's carefully folded and tucked behind the front cover. He stroked a thumb across the page and thought about the color blue.

Just after 8pm, the owner went on stage, tapped on the mic still in its stand, and drew the attention of the room. The audience went quiet, turning their eyes toward the stage, and Zuko once again focused on breathing and not giving in to his shaking hands. The owner said a few things that he only half heard, thanking people for coming to the reading, her excitement about hosting the Blue Spirit, that this was the Blue Spirit's first public appearance ever. A few excited claps and cheers from the audience made Zuko jolt, surprised despite himself. All too soon, the owner motioned for him to come forward, smile wide in her motherly face, and Zuko forced his legs to work, to bring him to the stage, up behind the microphone.

"Um, hello," he said, voice cracking a little, and the mic squeaked. Still, the audience watched him, too many eyes and expressions and faces, too much expectation. 

Why was hiding so much easier?

But he thought of Uncle, and Kiyi, and specifically Sokka and the ocean tide of loving him, and took a breath. 

"I’m, uh, the Blue Spirit," he said, more steadily, "and my name is Zuko Aki."

More cheers and claps, louder and more exuberant, and he managed a slim smile. 

"Thank you," he said, "so, um, I'll read a few of my poems from  _ Banished and Burning _ ," more cheers, "and then, if--well, really, if I'm brave enough, I'll read a few new poems as well."

There were some whistles and shouts at that, people beaming with excitement, and Zuko smiled a little again and opened up the pages he'd marked. His poems, his words, those painstaking inner feelings and thoughts and passions, all those strange insecurities and vulnerabilities that itched under his skin. He cleared his throat, kept his finger tight between the pages, and began. 

" _ Tell me about love stories... _ " he said, voice a bit thin, but as he read, it became clearer and stronger.

He remembered the origins of so many of the poems, the moments he’d written them, come up with them, what they revealed about himself. Stating them aloud, feeling them in his mouth again, it was easier to sense those moments again, dip safely into those old emotions while keeping them apart from who he was now.

Zuko smiled a little to himself, incongruously, because Sokka was right. Reading poetry aloud did hit different. 

People clapped as he finished that poem and paged to another one, and it was easier this time to read and also look at the audience, meet their eyes and feel their interest and energy. A few people still moved through the room, browsing the bookshelves, getting coffee, and even that was oddly reassuring. There was nothing extraordinary about him reading his poetry aloud, showing his face and saying his name. It was normal life, as safe and easy as any other night, another soul in the city, even out from behind the mask. He took a breath and continued. 

Someone entered as he was reading, just barely catching his eye, and he kept going, voice steady. Until he realized. Until he took in the person now leaning his shoulder against the side of a bookcase to watch him, and Zuko's throat closed, stumbling over his words. Sokka's eyes, just darkness from this distance but still his as they watched and took him in. They pinned Zuko, left him open and exposed here like he never quite had been with him before.

How was he here? But he was, he was, and Zuko had somehow been given another chance to tell him everything the only way he really knew how.

Zuko wet his lips, took a breath, and kept speaking his poems to the open room and to the person that they were really meant for. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks again all for reading, kudos-ing, and commenting! And don't worry, this is our last chapter where the boys are still confused and apart ;)


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Who's in the mood for some romantic declarations? :)

_And at last I know my love for you is here,_

_I can see it all, it is whole like the twilight,_

_It is large, so large, I could not see it before_

_Because of the little lights and flickers and interruptions,_

_Troubles, anxieties, and pains._

_You are the call and I am the answer,_

_You are the wish, and I the fulfillment,_

_You are the night, and I the day._

_What else—it is perfect enough_

\-- D.H. Lawrence

Sokka wasn't sure he'd go even after Professor Iroh pulled him aside to tell him about the Blue Spirit doing a public reading at Plain Talk Books and Coffee that night.

"The Blue Spirit," Sokka replied, trying to keep his voice level, "doesn't do public readings. He doesn't even show his face."

"Well," Professor Iroh replied with that odd twinkle in his eyes again, "apparently someone changed his mind, encouraged him to not keep quite so much hidden from the world and those who love him."

Sokka stared at him a moment.

"You definitely know Zuko is the Blue Spirit, don't you?" he asked, and Professor Iroh actually chuckled. 

"I should certainly hope I'd know my own nephew's pseudonym," he said fondly.

It took Sokka longer than he liked for his brain to catch up with what he'd just heard.

" _What_?" he demanded, considerably more aggressive than he'd normally be with a teacher. "How is--you--what--"

"Go to the reading," Iroh said, completely ignoring the absolute insanity of this situation. "See who he is, who he's really trying to be. He doesn’t want to bother you by asking you to come, but I know, deep down, he wants you there."

And Sokka had left baffled and blindsided again, graded essay clutched in his hand and brain in a whirlwind. But he almost hadn't gone to the reading, too raw still from seeing those poems and Zuko's notes about them, unsure how to move forward, unsure what Zuko wanted now. Once eight o'clock actually came around, though, he found he couldn't stay put, and just pacing around wasn't helping anymore. He had to see it for himself, what it meant for Zuko to step out of the shadows. [What that might possibly mean for the future].

He was late getting in, the space of the coffee shop already full and the reading already begun. He snuck to the side and leaned against a shelf to watch, because yes, impossibly, there was Zuko, on a stage, the Blue Spirit's book in his hand. He looked a bit different too, calmer and simpler somehow, and Sokka noted abruptly the absence of his rings or any other jewelry, his bare arms in a t-shirt, his slim legs and planted feet. There was a clear set in his eyes and across his shoulders too, a kind of openness Sokka wasn't used to seeing outside of their moments alone. Zuko's hands held the book gently, and Sokka was struck by a memory of those same hands against his skin, the reverent feel of that touch, and his stomach lurched. Zuko's voice was lovely in the room too, the careful way his sometimes husky tone hugged the words, slipped through the emotions, felt the pauses and emphasized the syllables. A bit of tension uncurled from Sokka's back, hearing that voice, watching that face. It didn't make sense that it should, but maybe that was ok anyway.

Zuko's eyes raised and found him as if pulled by a magnet, and his voice faltered for a moment, skittering across the words. He paused, a minuscule moment to breathe, and then he kept going. His eyes still moved down to the page and then up again, but they always came back to Sokka's, unwavering and sure. The way they had before when they’d sat together and he’d felt how Zuko studied his face as he spoke. Sokka stared back, caught up in the words, poems he knew so well, some he knew even more intimately now from seeing those notes and underlines and cross-outs. Yet they had a new life with Zuko's voice, the purity of it cutting through the quiet of the coffee shop.

And Zuko was watching him, reading to him, speaking to him.

Sokka clapped along with the other people in the audience as each poem ended, but it was clear that when Zuko smiled in response, it was only for him. Smiles he'd really only seen in private, the kind that softened his features, crept up into his eyes. Nervous and wanting and honest.

As the clapping died down, Zuko accepted a glass of water from some middle aged woman (the owner of the place maybe?), looking confused as he did so. But he took a few drinks, set the glass on the floor, and returned to the mic.

"Um," he began, and Sokka had to smile, "I'd, uh, like to read some new, still kind of in progress stuff if no one minds?"

The inflection at the end was inarguably charming, although Zuko looked flustered by the loud and enthusiastic response to it. He nodded and unfolded some papers from within the book, and Sokka found himself leaning forward along with everyone else, caught up in the intrigue and excitement of the Blue Spirit having new poems.

The Blue Spirit. Zuko. 

The same Zuko who sat on his bed, who talked to him over coffee, who listened with such incredible interest, who kissed him when he said goodbye. The one he'd told about Yue, about his classes, about his fears. The one who called him beautiful, who touched him and dragged his fingers through his hair, the one who believed those incredible things about Sokka that he so rarely believed about himself. The one with a fucked up past and a desire still to let Sokka into it. The one who had been there, and cared, and reassured as best he could.

Awkward, difficult, closed-off, sensitive, clever, loving Zuko.

Someone, maybe, Sokka was allowed to need something from.

Sokka swallowed and watched him start to read, something he didn't know but was absolutely still the Blue Spirit. The same sense of imagery and word choice, the same style of questioning and speaking to someone just off the page. 

_Tell me_ the Blue Spirit said from the stage, and Sokka was struck with a memory, those same words from Zuko's mouth like a prayer while Sokka pressed lips to his skin in response. 

_Tell me, Sokka. Tell me_

Sokka had answered even then: that it was Zuko he wanted, needed, a willingness to touch, to hold, to stay.

To think, somehow, they'd been asking and answering the same questions all along.

It all crashed together, all those feelings for both sides of the man on stage, the personas blending into something whole. Sokka _had_ known him. Zuko _had_ wanted him. There was more applause as Zuko finished two new poems, and Sokka clapped along with him. He had to talk to him. He had to find out where he was at now. Sokka had to let him know he had the words now, that there were things he could and could not give, but he _wanted_ anyway.

The applause died down, and Zuko smoothed out another page, looking more frightened again. 

"This last poem," he said, voice a little tight once more, "still isn't perfect, isn't good enough, but it's for and about…" his eyes rose to lock on Sokka's, his expression full of a fragile openness, "someone I love."

There were cheers and "awws" from the audience, and Zuko flushed a little, shaking his head. But when his eyes lifted off the page again, they were on Sokka, who had frozen completely. His heart was pounding as Zuko wet his lips and began:

" _Tell me about the color blue_."

The room had gone very hushed, and more often than not, Zuko's eyes were on Sokka, not on the page, as if he knew these words by heart already, as if maybe they were just him, speaking for himself.

The poem, those scattered ideas Sokka had already seen, now pure and complete.

"I've tried in vain to come up with words myself, but they fall short, a pebble in a vast sea," he said, eyes on Sokka, face pained. "I described you as an ocean once, half-correct, and I felt you as a storm, momentarily true. I drank you in like sky and told you about the pleasure of drowning. But it is not enough. Not for you and the truth of those morning-born eyes."

Sokka definitely couldn't breathe. For once, there wasn't a question in these words, not beyond the first line. 

Apparently Zuko now had answers too.

Other people were starting to notice the intensity of Zuko's eye contact with some strange man in the back of the room. A few people rotated in their chairs, trying to follow Zuko's gaze. Sokka barely noticed. 

"I have nothing worthy of you and this newly awakened soul except these stolen pieces, these syllables of debris. Interwoven now with my memories, interlaced with the taste of your skin," Zuko continued, voice heavy. "Lines I can barely tear out of my burdened lungs except for love of you, the need to speak."

Sokka couldn't drag his eyes away, and Zuko's were bright, for once so sure.

"Because if anyone in earth or heaven deserves the famous poets, then it's you." He touched his tongue to the edge of his lips. "The one who is every word for _blue_ I've ever written and more I'll never write. Who is worth each word I can wring from this too-often tied tongue. All of that and more."

Sokka could feel other eyes on him now, quiet little whispers, but he was only aware of Zuko. That this… this was how Zuko saw him, somehow. What he was thinking about when he tracked the movements of Sokka's face and stared into his eyes. These words, these images... 

"Because he's all states, and all princes, I," Zuko said, voice rising, expression sure, "And yes, to him, yes, I'd keep saying yes, yes, because he is moonlight dripping from the trees and all things I love in the light. He is why my flowers keep opening, and I am unworthy hands but still, for him, I'd seek."

Donne, Joyce, Tennison, Hayes. 

Sokka heard the murmurs around him and felt the emotions well in his eyes, the twist in his chest.

His favorite poet, who'd spoken to his soul, speaking directly to his eyes, who thought these things about _him_.

"And I do, even though I'm afraid, I do love him to Browning's depths and breadths and heights," Zuko said, even stronger now, those eyes vivid and beautiful even from across the room. "I do love him to the sharp edges of unseeable time because he is my true mind just like Shakespeare wrote. And I have, I have lost homes and cities, thought I had perfected this art of losing. But none compared, not in the burn or ache, to losing him. To losing you."

Zuko took a breath after that stanza of declaration, and not a soul other than him breathed in the room.

"But I know these are just stolen stamps stuck to an envelope I'm mailing, hoping against better reason that you'll open it. Begging as always that you'll read and recognize my lips upon this page, the secrets I am willing to pour out," Zuko continued, a sort of pain coming to his expression as he looked at Sokka again. "You knew me without form before. Know me again. Please let me love you better this second time."

Sokka tried to smile, tried to give him something, because it was huge and strange and more than he could really process, more than he'd ever thought he deserved. But he wasn't sure how clearly it came across. Zuko returned it anyway, thin and soft.

"The ancient Greeks didn't have a word for _blue_ ," Zuko concluded. "I'm still not sure that I do either, not one enough for how it feels to reach my fingertips out and find you waiting in the dark."

He fell silent, and there was an odd inhaled breath before the room burst into startled, raucous applause. Sokka, startled himself by it, supposed it was justified. How often did someone get to see that intense a love confession laid out like that on an open stage?

Never. Not like this. 

"Um, thank you," Zuko said into the mic as the applause continued, and he looked flustered again, like he suddenly remembered where he was. "Thank you. Really." He held his shut book between his hands. "That's what I have for tonight." He cleared his throat. "But, uh, I guess I'll be around a little while?" He looked to that same woman from earlier, who nodded agreement. "So you can come talk to me? Or buy a book? If you want?"

Sokka laughed at the ticked up endings, so true to this man and poet, this incongruous whole. A few more people in the audience laughed too as the clapping went loud again when Zuko left the stage. And Sokka loved him, loved him, loved him, the feeling echoing the rhythmic thud of his heart. It was a terrifying thought, but that didn't make it any less true.

Zuko was the poet he loved and the man he loved all tangled up together, and like Zuko had said, there weren't quite words for that.

***

_I am iron-gall ink, slippery and too dark and staining the tips of your fingers. Still, if you can, write me something. Something new._

_Make me an epitaph._

_Make me a prayer._

_I've been looking for a place to worship for a long time now. Let it be in the safety of your hands, against the violet-crushed shelter of your bones_.

\-- the Blue Spirit

Zuko had made it through, had said the words, and Sokka had been here to hear them. Somehow. Impossibly. He had finally heard Zuko say all the things he should have been saying before if he hadn't been so eaten up with self-loathing and convinced he had to keep him at arm's length. But that was done now. And Sokka, maybe, by some chance, was still here. Which basically meant Zuko had no idea what was happening or what to expect, but he'd done it. Revealed himself. Revealed his fire-licked heart.

Now it was just to be seen if Sokka was willing to pick it up out of the coals again.

Zuko felt awkward and confused by the attention once the owner had set him up at a table for a kind of meet and greet. He wasn't sure what he'd expected, but people genuinely interested in his work and complimenting him and buying his book was… not it. It was weirdly nice, though, more than his fear had ever let him believe, to be seen. He could do it, sit there and hear what people thought, realize they'd connected with his words too. These things he'd felt were so specific to him--his pain and insecurities and longings--were apparently more universal than he thought, resonated through other people too. Others who scratched at their own broken self esteem, ached to understand themselves, held themselves together with equally fragile but stubborn hands.

Maybe he really was less alone than he'd always thought.

He tries to be gracious and friendly to the people coming up, find ways to smile and nod and gesture like his heart wasn't vibrating out of his chest with wondering if Sokka was still here, what he'd thought, if he felt at all the same way after everything. 

Distantly as he signed a book for a young woman, he heard someone say, "Oh, you can go ahead of us," and then someone else saying, "Yeah, us too," and Zuko didn't know what was happening. Still, he passed the girl her new book, and when he next looked up again, Sokka was looking down at him.

His heart lurched in his chest--Sokka was still here, he'd come up, he hadn't been some fantasy projection of Zuko's yearning as he was on stage--but he couldn't get his mouth to move at all now that he was actually within arm's reach.

"Um hi," Sokka said finally, looking weirdly as nervous as Zuko felt as he tucked his hands in and out of the pockets of his coat and rocked on his heels.

He was strangely aware of the people behind Sokka watching and whispering, but he ignored them 

"Hey," Zuko replied once he could find his voice, face probably completely transparent in its emotions: longing, surprise, apprehension. "I… didn't know you were coming."

Sokka nodded. "Um, yeah, Professor Iroh told me about it and, well…" he met Zuko's eyes again, "I’m a fan of the Blue Spirit, so…”

A twinge of hope lifted the corner of Zuko's lips, and any annoyance he might have had at Iroh telling Sokka dissipated. Because Sokka was here, was meant to be here, had heard the words that Zuko's scared little soul had cobbled together to try to explain.

"I'm really glad you came, that you’re… here," he said softly, and Sokka looked strangely floored again.

"Oh um… that’s good. Yeah. The reading was really good," Sokka stumbled quickly on. "I've gone to a couple of poetry readings before because I always think poetry needs to be heard and experienced--which I've told you already, obviously. But, um, the way you did it was really, um, good, like I said already. I mean, you obviously have a nice voice for reading, and I did like your new stuff. Interesting. Vivid and, uh, emotive? I'll, uh, have to buy the new book once it comes out..."

Sokka seemed to realize he was babbling and that people were whispering, but Zuko could have listened to him talk forever as long as he stayed there, near him, watching him with those eyes and moving those safe, familiar hands.

"You'll get the first copy," Zuko said as soon as he realized he should probably speak, "if and when anything gets published again. I'll, um, make sure."

"Oh. Well. That's… cool," Sokka said, looking so strangely awkward and fumbling for him. "Can we… talk later?"

"Talk now!" someone yelled from the cluster of people behind him, and Zuko shot the random man a withering look. 

Sokka looked even more embarrassed then, but Zuko wouldn't let this slim chance be taken away. 

"We can talk later," he said, nodding, fervent. "I'd love to talk to you more if you're willing."

Sokka nodded. "Ok, good. Because I am. Willing, I mean." 

He shifted his weight, not leaving, and that was good, right? Zuko hardly dared hope. So he just watched him, not concerned at all by the people lined up behind Sokka, and admittedly, Sokka didn't seem worried about them either.

"Your last poem, um, the one for…" Sokka said carefully, motioning vaguely, and Zuko's stomach turned over. Sokka cleared his throat. "The one for that person. It was really… beautiful. Powerful and romantic, and I, uh, liked the poetry references."

"Yeah?" Zuko said, heart swelling, because Sokka had to know it was for him, had hopefully seen Zuko's pathetic little prototype. "I'm… glad," he went on, "because I wanted things that, uh, _he_ would recognize and appreciate, so he'd understand. Somehow." He smiled again, hopefully and fragile at once. "I'm not good at emotions if they're not in poetry."

Sokka smiled a little too, nodding like he understood. He probably did. He always had. 

"I'm surprised you included that last bit of _Ulysses_ as poetry," he said finally.

"Well, um, you-- _he_ thinks it's poetry, so…" Zuko said, something swelling inside him as he felt himself smile, "it seemed right."

"And you were _so_ adamant that it was fiction, and I definitely didn't think I convinced you," Sokka replied, smiling like he had so many times before, across textbooks and coffee cups and each other, "but maybe I'm… finally winning you over."

Zuko's heart leapt even higher, and no wonder Dickinson said hope was a thing with feathers. How else could it soar like this?

"We can always argue about it again," he said, remembering the first time they had, on Sokka's bed surrounded by books and just the right side of drunk, leaning together and getting loud and irreverent enough that Joyce himself had probably rolled over in his grave. Just one of many, many times that Zuko could look back on now and recognize as love.

"I do miss arguing with you about poetry," Sokka said softly, rubbing the back of his neck. "You know, like the giant nerds we are. No one else will engage with me anymore, not like you do. Did."

"Well…" Zuko ventured, because he agreed. God, so much. "I miss our coffee dates after class. My caffeine addiction headaches are terrible now because I can't bring myself to go to the student center without you. It just… doesn't feel the same."

Sokka's smile was careful. "We should go back then," he said.

Zuko made himself take a breath, hold out the metaphor of his upturned hands.

"Actually, uh," he said quickly, watching Sokka's eyes, each small movement of his face, "I'd love to take you to dinner if you'd let me. A real date." He wet his lips. "Something official."

There was muttering happening behind Sokka, which was making his skin prickle a little, but Zuko ignored it and waited. 

Maybe it was too late. Maybe Zuko was still too difficult to love.

"Really?" Sokka said, and _he_ actually looked nervous and shy.

"If you… want to," Zuko continued. "If you're willing to give me a second chance. For me to… do it right this time."

God, everything about Sokka made Zuko's chest hurt. He'd have to start the poem all over again to try to get him right.

"Well, goddamn," Sokka said, smile broadening, "after a declaration like that poem, I can't really say _no_ can I?"

Some excited noises behind Sokka now, grinning faces and people poking each other and beaming, but Zuko's stomach dropped

"You can say no," he said, wanting it to be clear. "You don't owe me anything, Sokka, just because--I didn't read that to try to convince you--"

"I know," Sokka said with another smile, soft and gentle and earth-rending. "It was a joke, Zuko, I promise."

Zuko managed to take a breath.

"I'd like to go because I _want_ to," Sokka finished. "Because I like you--both sides of you at once." There was something gentle in his expression then. "I would have said yes even before you read the last poem."

More noises, and Sokka got a bit of that surly expression in his face, like he was about three seconds from turning around and shushing their stupid audience. But when he met Zuko's eyes again, they were all warmth.

"And I… meant what I said," Zuko said, hoping desperately that Sokka would understand, "in that poem. I know those declarations were… a lot, and it scares the shit out of me, but I mean it. All of it. How I feel about you. That you deserve so much--that you deserve … everything, Sokka."

Sokka seemed caught in surprise, that same sort of surprise like the first time Zuko had called him beautiful. Zuko took a breath, and slowly, Sokka's face lifted into a sort of wondering smile.

"Well, it's a date then," Sokka said, to some frankly obnoxious muttering and grinning from behind him. He looked at the table and added, "Um, but can I still buy a book?"

Zuko looked at him in confusion. "You… already own this book?"

"Yeah," Sokka said, steady and careful with his words, "but I need to read it with fresh eyes, since this time I'm…" he swallowed and smiled a little, "in love with the author and all that."

Noises behind him again--squeals and gasps and things Zuko ignored because all he could think about was that face, those words, the truth in his voice and the kindness in his eyes. He still seemed unreal, so beyond Zuko's reach, and yet he was here, somehow 

Zuko picked up one of the fresh, glossy copies and passed it over.

"It's on me," he said, and he was sure he looked heart-wrenched and ridiculous, but he didn't care. "Consider it a final apology gift." His eyes were bright. "From, you know, someone that loves you too."

Sokka smiled again, and their fingers brushed against the book, lingering together, eyes locked. Then, before Zuko lost his nerve, he caught Sokka's wrist with his other hand and stood up just enough to kiss him across the table. Sokka gasped into his mouth, a brief startled pause, and then he was kissing him back, firm and sure, and Zuko wasn't aware of anything except the reality of that unfathomable touch.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Look how awkward and happy they are! :) I hope you enjoyed this chapter, and thanks to everyone for continuing to engage with this story! 
> 
> Also, a few people have asked about the poetry, so I'm actually compiling the Blue's Spirit's poems from this story (and the larger poems many of these chunks came from) and I'll put them all in one "Banished and Burning" document which I can put up as a companion piece to this one if anyone's interested. I will probably publish that along with the last chapter of this story.
> 
> Thanks again all!


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The boys get a chance to start over.

_ How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. _

_ I love thee to the depth and breadth and height _

_ My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight _

_ For the ends of being and ideal grace. _

_ I love thee to the level of every day's _

_ Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light. _

_ I love thee freely, as men strive for right. _

\-- Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

Inside Sokka were all those words Zuko was so good at creating to describe indescribable emotions, all rising up in him at Zuko's surprising kiss, at the swell of foolish, messy love between them. He drew back only when Zuko did, feeling breathless and a little lightheaded but also, just a little bit, like he was the most incredible and precious thing in the whole world.

Which was, very much, a new feeling for him. One he was learning that he was allowed to feel.

Zuko simply looked up at him with a smile so soft with love and adoration, Sokka about forgot about anything else.

"I'll… hang around," Sokka said finally, motioning away from himself and hearing the way his voice squeaked a little. "For whenever you're done here. So we can talk more."

Zuko smiled again. "Soon," he said. "I'll come find you. I'll… always keep reaching for you as long as you still want me."

Sokka's breath caught. 

"Goddamn you're good at this. How'd it take me so long to realize you were a poet?" he murmured and grabbed Zuko's face to kiss him again, to feel those lips on his again, to know this was all real. 

And Zuko just sighed into his mouth, reached up, and slid his thumb across Sokka's cheek. 

But they were also still in public, and if Sokka let this continue, he was gonna do something to get them both arrested. He drew back, still a little breathless, and watched as Zuko's eyes fluttered open too, warm and gold and watching him. Sokka smiled and made himself lean away, take a steadying breath. The new book was clutched tight in his hand.

"See you soon," he managed.

"Soon," Zuko said again, and finally Sokka managed to close both hands around the book and step aside. 

There were more mutters and noises, squeals and questions directed at Zuko still at the table, the whole thing feeling vaguely unreal, foggy and dreamlike. A few people definitely muttered things as Sokka passed, but he ignored them and kept walking. His head was spinning, too many emotions all kicking up inside of him. So he found a now vacated table near the door that still faced the stage and Zuko's table. From there, he could still see Zuko and his now very excited fans, and he could let himself be overwhelmed with the feeling inside him beyond the burst of love.

Pride. That Zuko had stood as himself, that he was finally getting the attention his poetry--and he as the poet--deserved. That he was being brave, for Sokka and for himself.

It was a lot to feel, a lot to carry, and Sokka really did hope Zuko hurried up. He needed him alone so he could finally talk to him about the poetry drafts, ask about how the reading had happened, curl his arms around him and bury his face in the side of his neck. Have a place alone where Sokka could run his fingers through his hair and look into those eyes, knowing the look in them was truly just for him. He wanted to make Zuko explain everything about how he wrote, where he got ideas, who his influences were. He wanted to lay against him and argue about Joyce and discuss Hayes further and circle back around to Bishop. He wanted to get his questions answered and then he wanted to kiss that beautiful mouth, taste the words there, write his own poetry against Zuko's skin and know him again, all of him at once.

But that would have to wait. For now, he could at least start  _ Banished and Burning  _ anew. He borrowed a pencil off one of the waitresses and opened up this stiff, fresh copy of Zuko's book. Another start for them. He began new notes on the very first poem. 

_ I don't know how much I can offer you besides this fire-licked heart. _

"Fire-licked" he circled once again, but wrote carefully beside it  _ literally, has been permanently damaged by fire, internally and externally.  _ He stared at it and then back up at the man still talking to strangers, handing out his books, being all of himself at once even if it caused his hands to shake. Then he underlined the next word and added  _ yet he's still all heart deep down, burning or not. _

***

_ Body a soft caterpillar core within this unwieldy cocoon. Lavender-faded eyelids and the feel of night in my teeth, but I am growing within this shatter-made home. _

_ I must emerge as something new, worthy of a waxing moon, worthy of a changing tide. _

_ Worthy of the space I can inhabit between your hands. _

\-- the Blue Spirit

Sokka was still waiting for him. Because that was who he was, Zuko realized as the last few people left the table and his handful of books. He was someone you could rely on, believe in, trust to keep being there, and in Zuko's fragile and too often pathetic experience, he hadn't realized that was something people could actually be.

But there he was, still at that table by the door. People moved past him, heading into the night, and the workers shuffled near him too, clearing tables and putting up chairs. He didn't raise his head, a few strands of hair falling in his face as he looked down at Zuko's book held open on the table, engrossed in whatever he was doing.

Zuko approached and took the seat across from him, and Sokka's eyes raised to find his again. It was just as breathtaking as every other time he was faced with that depth of blue, with the individual focus, being so fully seen.

Damn it, he was gonna have to write a whole other poem.

"Hey," Sokka said, lips lifting in a smile, and Zuko returned it, "how'd it go?"

"Good, actually," Zuko said, strangely nervous again. "People were, uh, nicer than I would have imagined. Excited about my stuff."

"Yeah, well," Sokka said, sitting back, "I'm not surprised." His smile was just this side of wry. "You obviously know how  _ I  _ feel about the Blue Spirit."

It was said with a gentle kindness to it, but Zuko's guilt remained. Somehow they'd circled back to where they'd begun, a small table over coffee and poetry. The opportunity Zuko had missed--rejected, avoided--to be all of himself from the beginning.

"Hey, I wanna start over," Zuko said abruptly. 

Sokka's eyebrows rose. "What?"

"Well, not really," Zuko said, scratching the back of his head, "because I want all the other stuff to still be there--all our conversations and that night at my apartment and god, shit, I wouldn't wanna forget about the sex." He was talking absolutely nonsense and tried to cut himself off. "But maybe start over without the bad stuff, if possible? But no, maybe we need that too, even if it sucks..."

"I'm confused," Sokka confessed, letting Zuko's book finally fall shut with his thumb keeping the page, and Zuko rubbed his hands down his face. 

He sighed, suddenly tired. "God, I'm shit at talking," he said, and thankfully, Sokka laughed and left him the space to continue. Another chance to fumble blindly toward explanation, toward loving him correctly.

"The first time we sat like this," Zuko started over, "and got coffee and talked about poetry, I should have told you the truth. Because you were right--what could you have possibly done by that point to already get sorted in with the people I keep at a distance from me? How could you possibly have hurt me by knowing I was the Blue Spirit?" He shook his head. "I should have been honest as soon as you mentioned it, as soon as I started realizing how I felt about you."

Sokka's face had gone more seriously again as he watched him, that same openness and interest Zuko had started loving from the very start.

"I do still have to hide from my family, for my safety, to be ok, and I know that. That it’s… part of my life," Zuko said. "And I think--I hope you get that too."

"I do," Sokka replied. "I promise I do, and I'd never ask you to change that or endanger yourself at all." He chewed his lips for just a second. "Are you still safe? Have they called again?"

"I'm safe," he said, heart swelling again at the look in Sokka's eyes. "Blocked all their numbers again and just delete anything from an unknown number that comes in. Haven't had to see or hear anything from them since that night."

"Good," Sokka replied, "but, the offer still stands. That you've got a place with me if you need it."

Zuko knew he did, and that was in itself another impossible gift. He nodded, swallowed, forced himself to go on.

Zuko ground himself in Sokka's presence, that he was still here. "So… I also know the way things were with Jet was… hard. Bad. Bad when we were together and when he left," he explained, still fumbling (why could he only express himself in poetry?), "but the rest of the world… I should never have pushed you away, pretended what we had wasn't a relationship, and kept you out of my life."

Sokka was still watching him, some tender expression in his face that Zuko wasn't sure how to read. He felt a bit like some hermit returning from a pilgrimage and having to relearn everything again, how to be a person in the world once more. God, he'd clung so long to the idea of being banished that he'd done it to himself.

And here was Sokka, welcoming him back home.

"So what I mean by ‘starting over’ is to say," Zuko finished, "Hi. I'm Zuko from Professor Iroh's class, and I'm also the Blue Spirit."

Sokka broke into a smile like a torchlight in the dark. "Well isn't that just crazy," he replied. "That's my favorite poet."

Zuko smiled back. "Yeah? Still?"

"Even more now, actually," Sokka replied, reaching a hand, palm up, across the table, "now that I know him, actually know him. I thought I did, from just the poetry, but it wasn't the whole picture." He beckoned, ever so gently, with that extended hand. "Not without also knowing he was funny and weird and shit-at-talking and smart and beautiful. Without knowing," he finished softly, "Zuko too."

Zuko accepted the hand stretched across the space between them and laced their fingers together, sure his face was turning red. 

"I know I can be… hard to love," he said quietly, "and I wanna be better--I do, but I might--I know it still might not be easy, being with me--if you want to really be with me."

"I want that," Sokka said, something firm and sure in his tone. 

"Ok. Me too. But..." Zuko said and then tried for a joking smile that might not have quite landed, based on Sokka's expression. "I'm not sure I'll be able to keep writing you poems like this every time I fuck it up."

Sokka stroked his thumb across Zuko's hand where the two still rested together, beside a book and a forgotten coffee mug. Zuko looked at those hands, the strange assurance of them.

"I don't know who told you that you were hard to love--the ex or your family or whoever," Sokka said, and Zuko raised his head to meet his eyes again, "but they were really, really wrong about you."

Zuko held still but allowed himself to cling to that hand, accept that it was still being given as a tether, a link between them that kept that door open, that bridge intact.

"I can't… I can't even  _ start _ to explain how awful and unfair life's been to you," Sokka murmured, still brushing that pad of his finger gently across Zuko's skin, a rhythmic, soothing back and forth, "but that doesn't make you  _ unloveable.  _ God's sake," Sokka added with a crooked smile, "I was half in love with you the moment you called out that dumbass for not knowing what a metaphor was."

Zuko smiled back too, just a little, at the cyclical nature of things, at the steady ebb and flow of Sokka's finger on his skin.

"So I'd say you're easy to love," Sokka continued, "but hard to... know, maybe. But that doesn't mean I need  _ poetry _ from you." He wet his lips a moment, as if considering. "I just need you, like you said, continuing to reach for me through the dark. And I'll… keep being there." He gently squeezed their knitted fingers. "Waiting to hold your hand."

Sokka smiled then, soft and careful again, and it was like they were on that balcony in the empty night, close enough to breathe the same air but this time without the smoke and ash between them.

Zuko didn't know what he'd ever possibly done to deserve that moment after a lifetime of pain-touched mistakes, of fighting and pulling away, of burying himself in that narrative distance. In his mind, it didn't make sense, what Sokka was offering to him. That he'd offer it at all. But at least this time he offered it knowing full well who'd be accepting, holding out his heart with his eyes wide open. 

"I can do that," Zuko said, because he could. He would. He wanted to.

Zuko didn't need to offer his heart again. Sokka already had it.

"Although you can also definitely write more poetry. That'd also be ok," Sokka said quickly, flushing just a little at the top of his cheeks, and Zuko smiled.

"I can do that too," he said, willing to live forever in the radiance of that smile if he could, for as long as Sokka would let him. "I'm not sure I could stop myself if I tried."

***

_ Someone, I tell you, will remember us, even in another time. _

\-- Sappho

Zuko did take him to dinner, somewhere a bit too fancy for the both of them and just the wrong side of uncomfortable in that way, but it was nice too. A real date, with candle light and conversation, nervous glances and hand holding. Sokka made him laugh when he told Zuko about the paper he'd written, Professor Iroh's not so subtle comments in the margins about the Blue Spirit. Zuko asked questions and watched his eyes in that way he did, and that portion was easy. He also paid for dinner at the end, and Sokka walked him home to his apartment. They were careful, appropriate, trying to do it right. Once there, Sokka kissed him at his door as they lingered in the hallway, the end of the date, the unclear moment when you ought to say goodbye. It was soft, gentle, the sweetest fit of their lips together. Sokka drew back and wondered, hand still just barely on Zuko's neck, when he was supposed to leave.

And then they both, abruptly and without discussion, apparently decided just a post-date goodbye kiss wasn't quite enough. Not for them, not for everything already alive and wild between them. Sokka moved to kiss him again, wrap arms tight around his shoulders, and Zuko pulled him backwards into his little apartment. Sokka let himself be pulled and grabbed on, let himself trip right over another strange line they'd drawn in the sand between them. They should have learned the first time around that those damn lines didn't work.

Something about them resisted boundaries, created its own way, and maybe it was time to trust in the unknowable tide of loving and being loved by someone like Zuko.

They stumbled over themselves, hasty and desperate again, all lips and teeth and clothes in the way, until Zuko paused, a hand on Sokka's chest to separate them. Sokka, breath still a little fast, stopped and looked at him, unsure what exactly was happening, what new arrangement this might be.

"Would you like to stay the night?" Zuko asked, palm still pressed flat to Sokka's bare skin and voice surprisingly formal.

"I--yes," Sokka said, reaching up to cover Zuko's hand on his chest. "Of course. Definitely."

Zuko smiled. "Ok good. Then we've… got time. Right?"

His fingers slid out from under Sokka's hand, ever so gently, down the line of Sokka's sternum, down the middle of his stomach, paused just above the line of his jeans. Just the drag of those fingers was like sparks trailing down Sokka's skin, making him shake. Zuko's fingers lingered, but his eyes watched him, heady and hot.

"We've got time," Sokka echoed, unsure exactly what that meant but ready for whatever it was. 

What it was turned out to be Zuko taking him apart and loving him with an exquisite, aching care that Sokka hadn't quite imagined possible. While Sokka tried not to lose his mind, Zuko lavished every place on his body that could possibly make Sokka's blood burn, could possibly making him pant or gasp or grapple for something to hold on to. It was being pressed into walls, against a bookshelf, onto the bed. It was hands on his skin and in his hair, lips on his chest and the inside of his thighs, breath in his mouth and across his collarbones. It was Sokka's own chance to touch and taste and explore, to spend as long as he wanted just murmuring longing as he licked and sucked at Zuko's ear, to take all the time he pleased to meet him halfway, to slide their bodies together like they were meant to fit that way. It was resting his forehead against Zuko's as he rolled against him, breathless and knowing him, seeing him, listening to Zuko murmur his name and his lusty poetry against his throat. It was letting the world keep moving along without them for a little while as they only moved with each other.

Well after, hours after they'd finished dinner and tried for a goodbye kiss at the door, they lay together in Zuko's bed and listened to the far off murmur of the city around them. Sokka breathed in the now more familiar smell of Zuko's space--books and age and soap-touched skin--and reached out for him. Zuko met him there, fingertips sliding across the back of his hand. There were no clocks within, and only the darkness outside and the laxity in their bodies betrayed the late hour, the slow slip away of the day behind them. 

" _ I am here _ ," Sokka quoted with a low laugh, " _ because I could never get the hang of time. _ "

Zuko laughed too, rolling his head to meet Sokka's eyes in the dark. " _ Love's not Time's fool _ ," he quoted back, " _ love alters not with his brief hours and weeks _ ," and Sokka laughed harder. 

Breathless and exhausted and full of more endorphins than he entirely knew what to do with. How had he ended up here, in something so unreal?

"Only you and me," he murmured, "would be quoting poetry after sex."

"Good thing we found each other then," Zuko said softly.

Sokka located the soft glint of his eyes in the dark and rolled to kiss him again.

Because he could. Because this was his. Because this was something he was allowed to hold, to keep, to want. 

"Read me something," he murmured, tucking himself into Zuko's arms. "If you don't mind."

"I don't mind," Zuko replied, "because tonight--I want tonight to be right. Good. What that night with "Lighthead" and the morning after  _ should _ have been."

Sokka sighed and nestled closer. "I want that too."

Zuko found and kissed him again, between the eyebrows and on the temple and at the corner of his lips. Then he tracked down his phone and scrolled through options until he settled on one.

"Nikita Gill," he said. "Not long but… right. I think. For you and me. If that sounds good."

"Sounds great," Sokka said and slid his fingers into the subtle spaces between Zuko's ribs.

" _ One day you will meet someone _ ," Zuko read softly, his voice a low rumble through his chest, " _ who will see the universe that was knitted into your bones _ ."

Sokka let his eyes slide closed, curled up within this warmth of time and word and body.

" _And the embers of galaxies glow to life in your eyes_ ," Zuko continued, hand drifting up to play in Sokka's hair. " _And then you will finally know_ …" he brushed back the loosened strands from Sokka's forehead, " _what love is supposed to feel like_."

Sokka smiled against his skin, felt as Zuko moved to set his phone aside again and return to their position, their tangled up bodies in the unconcerned dark. And he fell asleep not long after.

He woke up, once again, to Zuko rising with the dawn.

"Hey, my love," Zuko said to Sokka's softly opened eyes, and he wondered briefly if he was still dreaming. 

Everything was blurry and dark blue, but Zuko was there within it, reaching for Sokka's face. Too strangely perfect.

"You leaving?" Sokka murmured, leaning into that hand slipping through his hair. "Rising with the sun?"

"Yeah, but I'll be back," Zuko replied with a soft smile. "I'll be back with coffee and back in bed with you soon."

Sokka hummed into the warmth of the palm that moved to hold his jaw, his head still dropped back against the pillow.

"I won't go through your stuff," he murmured back. 

Zuko's thumb brushed just under his lips, and his expression was tender and shadowed in the fragile light. 

"You can," he said. "I've got nothing left to hide."

"I didn't mean to before, and I don't need to--don't want to now," Sokka replied, letting his eyes fall shut as sleep tugged at him again. "I know you, Zuko. I know we have each other."

He sighed as Zuko bent to kiss him again.

" _ Let me press myself against your ribs and know you with my eyes shut _ ," Zuko murmured, and Sokka couldn't hold back his smile.

"I love that one," he whispered and felt himself slide back into a strangely contented sleep.

When he awoke again, it was to a returned Zuko pressing very soft kisses to his face, his shoulders, his neck, until Sokka blinked awake and pulled him close again. Zuko's pliant body curled around him, balanced on an elbow to look down into his face. There were coffees on top of the small shelf beside the bed, and the room was bathed with light, and Zuko was here. This was what it should have been, before. Had they been doing this without the secrets and the fear keeping them apart. It should have been these slow and gentle hands, Zuko's eyes as warm and gold as the morning sun as they looked down at him, his edges softened with the light coming in behind him from outside. Had they done this right the first time, it would have looked this way, these overlapping limbs and easy laughter and lingering glances and tipped together foreheads. It would have been them side by side on the bed, drinking coffee and talking about the Blue Spirit, arguing about Joyce, going through Zuko's strange and expansive book collection. It would have been Sokka's hand reaching out to cup Zuko's cheek, a face turned to press a kiss into his palm as his lashes fluttered closed.

But they had it now, on the second try, and maybe that was all that really mattered.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The next chapter is just a short epilogue to wrap up some final loose ends :)
> 
> Thanks so much again to everyone who's followed along with this story and talked to me about it! You're all wonderful


	11. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Loose ends are tied up, and our boys are happy :)

_Yet I could love you in a thousand foolish, imperfect ways._

_You, you could run fingertips across the bruises of my soul, and I would trust you not to inflict more pain. Offer apple-sweet words and your thumbs beneath my salt-sharp eyes._

_In turn I will offer you all that I can, all that's left of me._

\-- the Blue Spirit

"Come on, just let me keep this one!"

Sokka shook the trash can at him again. "Nope, no more cigarettes," he said. "Throw 'em in."

Zuko sighed but did, adding that last pack to the other ones he'd hidden around his apartment for emergencies which were now piled up in the trash. Deep down, he knew Sokka was right. He had to stop masking and hiding and burning his insides just because he couldn't deal with his feelings. 

"Yell, scream, cry, write, go for a walk, troll people online who give your book bad reviews, I don't give a fuck," Sokka had said when he'd first suggested this a week ago, "but no more smoking. You're better than that!"

"What about you?" Zuko had demanded, irritated. "You smoked with me!"

"Yeah, one time," Sokka said, "and I'm not hiding cigarettes around my apartment because I can't deal with myself."

They'd glared at each other for a moment, and then Sokka had softened and dipped into his damn secret weapon vault.

"Come on, Blue Spirit," he said with a gentle smile, "you don't need 'em anymore. You've got people who love you, who care about you, who want the best for you."

And Zuko had given in--how could he not for Sokka? for love?--and began the hunt for any packs he'd squirreled away in his apartment or forgotten about. Just another chance to purge his sacred little apartment, make it truly _his_ now. No more negative reminders of Jet. No more focus on fear of his family. Just him, just his. Well his, and maybe a little bit Sokka's now too. But those touches--a Chemistry textbook forgotten on the loveseat, a few extra dirty mugs in the sink, another toothbrush in the cup by the bathroom sink, a different shirt Sokka had left that sometimes Zuko stole to wear when the world made him edgy and itchy again--were welcome. Like Sokka's tattoos as reminders, those lingering mementos spoke of beauty, and permanence, and love.

No more negative coping methods. No more fire. 

After the purge was done, they'd collapsed in Zuko's bed, side by side, and Sokka stroked his fingers over Zuko's smooth, bare hands. It was soft and snowing outside as it slipped into December and winter break, finals behind them and the unmarked future ahead.

"I finally told my dad. About classes. About this semester," Sokka said softly, and Zuko watched Sokka's hands against his, their entwined fingers. He shifted to lay a little closer beside him.

"Was it ok?" Zuko asked, turning to look at Sokka's profile and the way his eyebrows pulled down. 

He knew most fathers and most families were not like his. He wanted to believe that Sokka would be safe and loved regardless, but if, by chance, Sokka's family was a little too much like Zuko's, he wanted him to know he was not alone. That Zuko was beside him. With him. On his side. He stroked his fingertips against Sokka's palm.

"He was… disappointed," Sokka admitted softly, "that I'm starting to reconsider, weigh my options. Especially," he added with a sigh, "that I'll have to retake classes and be in school longer." He stroked a thumb along one of the bones on the back of Zuko's hand. "But…"

"But?" Zuko asked softly, moving his hand now to knit their fingers together, to hold firmly.

"But he accepted it," Sokka said. "Accepted that I gotta figure out what's best for me, who I actually wanna be." He bit and released his lower lip. "I don't know what that looks like right now--maybe it is engineering, maybe it's something else--but I know I can't just keep accepting whatever comes to me." 

"Good," Zuko said. "You're worth more than that."

Sokka squeezed Zuko's hand and met his eyes. "You showed me that," he said, "that I gotta be and love what's actually inside me."

Zuko stared into those eyes, truthful and vast as the sky, and loved him so much all over again. Loved him in a way he would have said was impossible a year ago. Loved him in a way he'd always assumed the poets were exaggerating when they described it. He brought Sokka's hand to his lips and kissed it, let his mouth linger softly against the curve of a knuckle. 

"Whatever you choose, whatever you end up doing," he murmured to that hand, to those eyes, "you're... gonna be great at it."

Sokka grunted something like a laugh. "Look who's getting better at making actual sentences when he compliments me."

"I'm doing my best," Zuko grumbled back, grinning weakly through it. "But really, I hope you know that, uh, whatever happens, as long as you want me there, I'll be next to you, believing in you." He kissed his hand again and smiled a little more. "Trying to capture you in poetry."

Sokka watched him, expression soft, and his face curved up into a smile too.

"I love you too," he murmured, understanding without words.

Zuko didn't need that fire anymore, didn't need to breathe smoke to feel something, to live with himself. He could live as himself, all of who he was, love what was inside him. Just like Sokka did. 

And deep down, he knew he ought to get rid of the cigarettes anyway. He had to clean his apartment and make it appropriate for guests after all, what with his mom and uncle and sister coming.

Zuko had been terrified to invite them in (what if his mom told his dad? what if something bad happened to Uncle? what if Kiyi stopped wanting to write to him?), but Sokka had just squeezed his hand and told him he'd be there too. So he'd done it, with no cigarettes and no disguises, and now the day was here and he was cold with nerves. But he had Sokka, and he had this life he'd made, and that would be enough. It had to be enough.

"You owe me another poem," Sokka announced as they waited together on the loveseat for Zuko's family to arrive. Maybe he could sense Zuko's nerves.

"Why's that? My last one wasn't good enough?" Zuko asked with a grin, pushing down his anxiety. "Need a new poem so you can get another 'A' from my uncle for your 'compelling analysis' and 'thoughtful critiques'?"

Sokka laughed then, a noise that still cut right through Zuko's chest, eased something inside him again.

"Nah, I just like seeing what you come up with when you know nobody but me is gonna hear them," Sokka said with a suggestive tick to his eyebrow. "That last one with the bit about my hands…"

"You've got a weird kink, babe," Zuko said fondly, and then tried to remember a part he'd already been playing with. " _Exhale the stars against my tongue until I'm a sun myself, until my mouth can hardly speak for want of you…"_

"Ooh, that's pretty good," Sokka said, leaning over to kiss him. "Tell me more…"

"My sister," Zuko said between his kisses, "could literally be here any minute."

"Just a little more," Sokka purred, kissing down his throat. "Just a few more pretty words for me…"

"You're depraved," Zuko said, pulling his mouth up to kiss him harder before Sokka ducked away to nuzzle into his neck again, "but _fuck, I would let you lead me into temptation, let you take my soul apart with just your teeth…"_

Sokka hummed pleasantly against his throat. 

"If you ever wanna get a bunch of people hot for the Blue Spirit," he murmured, "have I got a book idea for you."

Zuko shook his head. "No. You're my only audience for these words--the only one that deserves them."

"That was really good too," Sokka said, eyebrows raising. 

"That one wasn't intentional," Zuko admitted as there was a knock on the door and he lunged to his feet.

"Soul of a poet," Sokka sighed up at him, and Zuko knew he was blushing but couldn't stop it.

He opened the door to be greeted by his mother, looking as gentle and reserved as always, his uncle quiet and proud beside her, and a much less dignified Kiyi, who threw herself full bore at his legs.

"Big brother!" she shrieked, clutching him tight as he tried to bend down to return the hug. 

"Hey Ki'," he replied, still trying to hug back. "You found the place."

"Yep!" Kiyi said, finally drawing back to look around. It was strange to remember that they shared the same dark hair, a similar nose, something in the furrow between her eyebrows, that they could be connected that way. 

She turned that too recognizable furrow on the apartment now. "Oh, this isn't like the Batcave at all…" she muttered, clearly not trying to hide her disappointment.

Zuko laughed a little and Sokka behind him laughed louder.

"Yeah, how dare you not be Batman, Zuko," he agreed as Kiyi continued to look critically around. 

"I told you it wasn't cool like that," Zuko said, oddly nervous. "It's just an apartment. Just because you can't tell people where it is doesn't mean it's special."

"It's special in that you're here," his mom said as she stepped inside and pulled him into a careful hug. 

He returned it, some part of him still going pliant and feeling safe with her arms around him, even with the hurt still there sometimes. It helped too that Uncle then wrapped his arms around from his other side, a whole circle of familiarity and warmth.

"It's special in that we're all here together," Uncle offered softly.

It was strange, being surrounded, being held, and it made Zuko tense and feel weird but also… nice. Like the reading again. Like talking to his fans. Like being with Sokka.

When they both let him go, he stepped around and shut the door behind them both.

"Thanks for coming, Mom, Uncle," he said, forcing down the nerves and trying to look at his apartment with fresh eyes.

Books, clutter, used furniture, sun through the door to the balcony, Sokka. 

Home.

"Mr. Amaruq," Uncle said with that knowing mirth he so often carried around, and Sokka looked up in surprise.

"Professor Iroh," he said with a smile.

"A-ma-rook," Kiyi repeated carefully, looking at Uncle, and then turned to Sokka, hands on her hips. "So who're you?"

"Oh, I'm…" Sokka began, because oh, they hadn't talked about this in the weeks they'd been officially together and they should have. Sokka glanced up at him, "I'm Zuko's…"

"Boyfriend," Zuko said, only a little unsure, because saying the word felt right, even in front of his family. That label they'd foolishly danced around for so long.

Based on the startled expression and then brilliant smile Sokka gave him, it felt right to him too.

"Oh," Kiyi said and then turned on Zuko. "You never said!" It was almost accusatory, full of righteous indignation.

"No, you didn't," his mother offered, grinning and looking over at Uncle with a raised eyebrow. 

Uncle, of course, just chuckled and nodded, and Zuko felt himself flush just a little. Kiyi was still just looking back and forth between them, quizzical and annoyed in equal parts.

Zuko met Sokka's eyes, smiling a little.

"It's still pretty new," he said, "but yeah, Kiyi," he nodded to her, "meet my boyfriend Sokka, and Sokka, meet my little sister Kiyi."

Sokka turned back to her and extended his hand, mock serious.

"Miss Kiyi, it's an honor to meet you officially," he said in a low voice. 

Kiyi giggled but shook his hand. 

"Nice to meet you, Mr. Sokka," Kiyi said with one of her large grins. "You have funny hair."

"Kiyi!" Zuko's mom said almost sharply, but Sokka just laughed.

"It is kinda funny," Sokka said and then reached out and tugged on her little ponytail, "but so is yours!"

Kiyi laughed and swatted his hand away, and then she looked back over at Zuko, grinning broadly.

Zuko's mom's hand landed on his shoulder, still careful, as if afraid to be shrugged off. 

"I'm glad you've found someone for yourself," she murmured as they both watched Sokka and Kiyi continue to joke and tease each other.

"I got… really lucky," Zuko whispered, heart tight in his chest, "finding him."

"From my perspective," Uncle offered with another knowing smile, "it seemed like he found you."

Zuko looked back at his uncle, unable to argue that point, and his mom squeezed her hand on his shoulder. He glanced back at her, the face he still struggled to reconcile with his past, with his present.

But his future, his future was in front of him. Kiyi doing some sort of secret handshake with Sokka, both laughing. Sokka, at home here, in his apartment, his private space. There were people who he could trust with his whole self, gathered here in this moment, and if there wasn't a kind of poetry in that…

"I like him," Kiyi announced then, pointing at Sokka, who laughed again. 

Sokka met his eyes, that unwavering, impossible blue, and Zuko replied with his own smile and a heart that felt a lot less banished and burning than it had in a long time: "Yeah. Me too."

***

_Tell me again about the color blue._

_Keep telling me until I have learned enough to believe you without listening to the ghosts of my pain, enough to prove that you were right in choosing me. That we can be a pair of binary stars together lighting the path until morning._

_Or be the morning, my morning, an awakened sky and the spreading blue of your heart that I will love the very best I can._

\-- Zuko Aki

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much for reading this story and following along with me!! You all are wonderful!
> 
> I added a final chapter just to include "Banished and Burning." It's probably not really enough to be a full collection, but it includes all the poems and lines from this story, plus the larger poems that many of the sections/stanzas came from. So I hope you enjoy!


	12. Banished and Burning

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A collection of the Blue Spirit's poetry, including his newest pieces inspired by Sokka :)

_I don't know how much I can offer you besides_ _this fire-licked heart_ _._

_I'd rather you supplied the stories, the answers to the questions caught in my throat like stones. Maybe you'll find the words I can't, the ones that turned to ash and crumbled in my hands._

_So I'll beg you again and again for responses you might give: tell me, tell me, tell me_

\---

_Tell me about this body._

_Brindle-hearted and prone to wandering. I would go if my soul was not a split open pear._

_I want to be purged but there's too much, my skull breaking with the strain of holding all of me within, all of this matted and ill mannered self._

_Wine left in the sun. The yellowing bruise still lingering. Blood between the teeth. Heavy with too much tarnish._

_I'm a house after a fire, brittle with ash, dirtying to the touch._

\---

_Tell me about monsters._

_Punch-drunk encyclopedias as old as humanity, hand-sketched catalogue of all the things we fear. We tie our hands together and count shadows, count heartbeats, and leave bells on cords in case the dead still cry._

_How many of our monsters are human in the end? Why too often is it just my pain-painted face in the mirror?_

\---

_I never learned to love myself_ _\--a skill untaught, instinct trained out of me by razor blade smiles._

_Loving myself is the dreamer lost in an unfamiliar city and searching, never knowing what it is they search for. Just that it's out there, waiting, out of reach._

_Acid-torn, unreadable, a burden I can't lift with these bone-scavenger's hands._

_Instead, can I know love by loving you?_

\---

_Let's talk about volcanos_ _, the hollow caldera of my aching form, the stories the ancients told about the passion of gods, given form in earth and fire._

_I don’t think I’ve known this sort of passion, and yet I look at you and feel it like a burn. Like that inner fire beginning to churn, the distant rumble of oncoming explosion._

_I am not so fiery. I breathe ash and still apologize for the way my breath touches air, the way my skin cries out for you, for the pain that you still bear in the channels of your veins, in the uneven memory of your hands._

_Tell me all the burdens that you carry, the words I could lick into your open wounds to help them heal since I clearly cannot heal my own._

_I’d prefer it that way, to give and be given, to bare this magma-self for you, whatever melody you might offer and whatever harmony I might repeat._

_Lover, unstitch my seams and parse me out into digestible elements. Fire-tongued, earth-hearted, water-bled, air-woven._

_Hold me up to the light and look through me, see me, know me._

_I am a totem in your hands. I only make magic at your touch._

\---

_Tell me about a soul adrift._

_No, tell me about a shipwreck, taken back by the ink-blue fingers of the sea to be sung to sleep there. A soul made slippery with algae, preserved in the bitter blanket of salt. Am I waiting to be found?_

_Salvage the worthwhile parts of me._

_Dig through the history, the calcified chains that still secure the unholy pieces. Let the fish gnaw, pick apart the remnants of past traumas and my scarlet-licked insecurities. Let fragments be tossed foam-white upon an unknown shore._

_Leave most of me under the pull of the moon, nothing but the old scar of memory._

_Because I am on an island in the dark, losing the difference between sky and sea. I could dissolve in either now._

_Can hearts be regrown, that shipwreck rebuilt?_

_Can we collect the ruins left under the stars and cobble the worthwhile pieces together, seam to seam? Craft something that will float, will be able to point toward the horizon and follow the freckle-map of summer stars. Make this new heart a cartographer, a philosopher, a captain. Make this new heart a collector of wind._

_Just make sure it is stronger than the last one._

\---

_Tell me about love stories_ _._

_Not the_ befores _, infatuation and fragile-eyed glances. And not the beginnings either. We end our romances with beginnings: the first kisses, the love declarations, the proposals and grand gestures._

 _Tell me about the_ after _._

_After we say the words, when we must uncrop the perfect picture. How does love eventually shift from noun to verb?_

_I ask for myself, ask from this overloud void of my heart. Words that clot up in my throat, honey-thick, because I don’t yet understand. I want, I want, I want to understand._

_Show me what lovers mean by forever, what it is to tuck myself up against your ribs and know you even with my eyes closed._

\---

_Tell me about time._ _I am running out._

 _I look up from this unmoving home on the ground, from this existence where I drown in my own self-loathing. As always, I'm on a storm-black shore and the sky is out of reach._

_Did you know most of the stars we can see died ages ago? What we view above is an echo, a memory, the continued path of light from something lost._

_When I pray upward for self-actualization, do I plead with ghosts? When I extend my hands, are they really just the moss-pattern of scars, white with time?_

_When we knit our fingers together, is that hand I hold any less empty than those suns with their death knells lightyears out of time?_

\---

_I spend too long thinking about breath_ _. My poetry gets riddled with the same images of ribs and lungs, a melody I pluck out over and over like a lullaby. Let me self-soothe. Let me pretend._

_Tell me something else new. Give me a fresh exhale._

_I'm stitched together pieces of grey sky, overcast clouds, a shiver of empty skin. I could be blown away like his cigarette smoke, the ashen taste of his memory._

_But you are something else entirely._

_My shuttered eyelids are too heavy, all my burdens packed up in the bags beneath my eyes. My lungs should be furnace bellows but instead they feel like the grey curls left in the hearth, just a touch from crumbling._

_This was meant to be a reflection in generals. I always find myself pried back to specifics._

_Tell me about being touch starved._

_But no, that's my story not yours, because I'm brimstone blood in technicolor. Desperation that aches under my sternum, through the gaps between my ribs, and I just want the brush of your fingertips, your heart-heated palm._

_I just need the feeling, to trust that I am worthy of your hands, that I am not a supernova burning anything that comes too near._

\---

_I am extending a hand outward_ _, palm raised._

_Indigo-tongued syllables bitten into flesh, held in memory. The wire-fray of my nerve endings, the phonogram recording of my voice echoing on and on. The skip of the needle, over record grooves and over silt-black lines on skin. Repetition like the metronomic moon, counting out the ebbs and flows of time._

_I pick apart the loose threads of my self worth, looking for holes_.

_I turn myself over like a river stone, worn too smooth with constant use._

_I am iron-gall ink, slippery and too dark and staining the tips of your fingers. Still, if you can, write me something. Something new._

_Make me an epitaph._

_Make me a prayer._

_I've been looking for a place to worship for a long time now. Let it be in the safety of your hands, against the violet-crushed shelter of your bones_.

\---

_Tell me about point of view._

_My pain’s a lingering bedfellow, a hiccup caught in my throat, the space between the period and the next capitalization. It breeds my apologies into punctuation, and I have to speak in singularity but live a plural. I've become a glottal stop, linguistic irregularity, English and its bastard conjugations._

_I'd like to tell you about punctuation but I'm tongue tied and hamstrung by my own history._

_I would like to live in the sunset of consistent point of view, but I don't know if it's possible for me. I've been buried too deep to not squint now at the coming light._

\---

_Yet I could love you_ _in a thousand foolish, imperfect ways._

_You, you could run fingertips across the bruises of my soul, and I would trust you not to inflict more pain. Offer apple-sweet words and your thumbs beneath my salt-sharp eyes._

_In turn I will offer you all that I can, all that's left of me._

\---

_I am learning_ _, slowly, slowly, to explain the way words weigh upon my skin, the way history creates meaning and back again._

_Home before was violence, a not-quite-safe room, a spider-thread of privacy. It was raised voices in the night and nails dug into skin. It was haven and prison eternally looped, ven diagrammed, until there was no way to equate the words house without hearing fear._

_Let me try to explain freedom without the loaded propaganda, the lofty ideology._

_Let's redefine, start over, pave flat and correct._

_There are vocabularies to rearrange, associations to unravel and undo. There are scars on both bodies to touch, wounds to lick clean, and concepts to unwrap with shaking hands. Relearning speech and faith and family with uneven success, a foot-slide as we push this boulder up the mountain, but your sweat-slick brow is furrowed like my own. Your shoulder presses into mine._

_Tell me about the concept of home._

_I ask only because I hope, one day, that home will only be the space it takes to write your name._

\---

_Tell me about transformation_ _, rearranging tendons and my re-beating heart._

_We pretend change is gentle, a sunrise, a flow of water again stone. Deep down we know it's not, that it's more akin to the werewolf's rending skin than to a slowly blinked open eye, looking into the sun._

_I have been displaced too long, the door shut before me, to view change without trepidation, without feeling the cold of a long-barred window and a well-worn track._

_I don't know how to evolve anymore. I've got only this desire, this acrid longing on my lips. Can I try? Will you help me?_

_Body a soft caterpillar core within this unwieldy cocoon. Lavender-faded eyelids and the feel of night in my teeth, but I am growing within this shatter-made home._

_I must emerge as something new, worthy of a waxing moon, worthy of a changing tide._

_Worthy of the space I can inhabit between your hands._

\---

_Tell me about a new year._

_The sun rises ice-bright in the east like it always does, the earth continues it's celestial arabesques. Labyrinthine progression, following those same pirouette silhouettes as each sun-roll before._

_Resolve to treat my body less like the shackles I make it. Resolve to swim onward until I have to break for breath._

_Tell me about the myth of seasons._

_I don't know how to process the way we exist. I think I'd prefer to live non-linear, a book told back and forth through years so that all we see is the circles, the inherent knitted meaning between events. Know the future will end with a yellow sign, the past will be guided by footprints caked with snow. The present no longer a net, no longer a wall I scrape my nails against._

_New dawn in steel hues and life's reinvention, the constant moving target of_ home _at the horizon line. Here is another chance to step to the edge. Another chance to step over._

_You could come with me._

_Maybe this time we will rise._

\---

_Tell me about the color blue._

_I've tried in vain to come up with words myself, but they fall short, a pebble in a vast sea. I described you as an ocean once, half-correct, and I felt you as a storm, momentarily true. I drank you in like sky and told you about the pleasure of drowning._

_But it is not enough. Not for you and the truth of those morning-born eyes._

_I have nothing worthy of you and this newly awakened soul except these stolen pieces, these syllables of debris. Interwoven now with my memories, interlaced with the taste of your skin. Lines I can barely tear out of my burdened lungs except for love of you, the need to speak._

_Because if anyone in earth or heaven deserves the famous poets, then it's you. The one who is every word for blue I've ever written and more I'll never write. Who is worth each word I can wring from this too-often tied tongue. All of that and more._

_Because he's all states, and all princes, I._

_And yes, to him, yes, I'd keep saying yes, yes, because he is moonlight dripping from the trees and all things I love brought to light._

_He is why my flowers keep opening, and I am unworthy hands but still, for him, I'd seek._

_And I do, even though I'm afraid, I do love him to Browning's depths and breadths and heights._

_I do love him to the sharp edges of unseeable time because he is my true mind just like Shakespeare wrote._

_And I have, I have lost homes and cities, thought I had perfected this art of losing. But none compared, not in the burn or ache, to losing him._

_To losing you._

_But I know these are just stolen stamps stuck to an envelope I'm mailing, hoping against better reason that you'll open it. Begging as always that you'll read and recognize my lips upon this page, the secrets I am willing to pour out._

_You knew me without form before. Know me again. Please let me love you better this second time._

_The ancient Greeks didn't have a word for blue. I'm still not sure that I do either, not one enough for how it feels to reach my fingertips out and find you waiting in the dark._

\---

_Tell me again about the color blue._

_Keep telling me until I have learned enough to believe you without listening to the ghosts of my pain, enough to prove that you were right in choosing me. That we can be a pair of binary stars together lighting the path until morning._

_Or be the morning, my morning, an awakened sky and the spreading blue of your heart that I will love the very best I can._

\-- Zuko Aki

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks again, all! Hope you enjoyed all the poetry being collected together here! If you ever wanna chat with me about writing or poetry or Zukka, always feel free to hop over to my tumblr: onmyliteraturebullshitagain


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